Many know Ernie Crist was a communist. Few know why ~ Vancouver District counciilor’s past, he says over a Greek saiad i the White Spon, - haunts him. But he has no regrets. RIST’S WORLD. view began to take shape during his first- hand experience of war as a uni- versity student in Munich in 1942. BY ANDREW MCCREDIE Community Editor The physical and spiritual destruction of the German city taught the young commerce student the true value of material wealth: don’t put all your beliefs on material things because they can be destroyed. In the waning months of the war, as Hitler threw any and all German men into the breech, Crist was called up for service. “Y was small and so undernourished the guy looked at me and said ‘Come back in six months,’” Crist recalls. Two weeks later the war was over. Troubled by the total chaos of war and the ugly face of Fascism, Crist retumed to his native Austria in 1945 and worked for several years running a hardware store. Crist was the only one of his pre-war class- mates to survive to see Europe in peace. But war still haunted him. “I was still afraid of war, so 1 wanted to go somewhere where I could live in peace,” Crist says. “So ] came to Canada." He arrived in Ottawa in 1953, but his search for a peaceful place ran up against the burgeoning arsenal of high-tech weaponry being amassed by the Cold War powers. hey invented the InterContinental allistic Missile, the Atomic bomb — there wasn't a place in the world where you'd be safe," Crist says. “So | thought ‘what do I do now For the still single Crist, the thing to do “was “fight this evil called war." He joined the peace movement before most Canadians even knew there was such a thing. And fike so many young men in North America in the Fifties, Crist went West —“until [ couldn’t go any further” — arriving in Vancouver in April of 1954. Crist quickly found a job as a door-to- door Fuller Brush salesman in Vancouver. And while he admits it wasn't the best job in the world, Crist credits those face-to-face (and face-to-door) experiences with teaching him about the Canadian _ peo- ple’s character. A year after arriving in Vancouver, he went to work for Woodwards, a job that lasted 10 years B during this time Crist, by now a card carry- ing member of the Communist Party of Canada, delved - deeper into Marxism and the writings of Faust, scarching classical writings for a work- able blueprint for peace. He realized that everything he had been taught was, in his words, bunk. Sure { could tell you what year Emperor Red Beard crossed the Po river and fell off his horse and drowned,” he says, “But why the ckass wanted to g0 to Italy in the first place, } couldn't tell you.” It wasn’t a thunderbolt of revelation that began Crist on his search for the whys and how comes behind man’s actions. Rather. it ERNIE CRIST was the only one of his pre-war classmates to survive. was building belief anchored in the read- ings of Karl Marx. “He asked, to me, the most important question: ‘What are the motivating forces that compel society to move forward,"” Crist says. Crist’s growing dissatisfaction with the way society was headed ied him to the Pacific Tribune, a communist newspaper published in Vancouver during the 1960s. Crist- left Woodwards for a job as the paper's circulation manager in 1965, But the cost of his beliefs, especially in the turbulent and paranoid '5Qs and 60s, took their toll. “My kids, my family (pause) all kinds of life-threatening things,” he says, letting the sentence drift oft, But he held fast to his beliefs. “T believed that in order for us to change — to prevent wars that would destroy us ail — we have to change the environment. I believed that Socialism was that vehicle - for change.” He admits today that this belief was some- what naive and idealistic, but he stil} main- tains that for society to produce a better human being. society must provide a greater environment for that human being. Events in Communist Russia in the late 60s began to turn Crist away from commu- nism. ‘Some very serious things were taking place in my brain,” Crist says of the times. “4 realized the communist experience had turned into a bureaucratic nightmare.” In 1972 Crist left the paper and began a job on the North Vancouver waterfront with Burrard Dry Dock. His first foray into the municipal political maeistrom came in 1972 as he led the first- ever successful rent strike in the history of British Columbia. Born: 1928 in Innsbruck, Austria Family: Joyce. wife of 37 years, son David, 33, and deceased daughter Katherine. Current occupation: North Vancouver District councillor Past occupations: Hardware store employ- ec, Fuller Brush salesman, Weodwards employee, Pacific Tribune circulation man- ager, Shipyard worker, Favorite author: Goethe Favorite movie: The Seven Samurai (1954) “It's the story of the world and the best movie ever made. Favorite North Shore place: Seymour Demonstration Forest His landlord wanted to hike his building’s rent by 37%. Because of this victory. and the subsequent press blitzkrieg,’ the provincial government drafted British Cotumbia’s Landlord-Tenant Act. “Up to this point, the tenants in B.C. were chattel,” Crist says, clearly stilt savoring his David and Goliath-like victory. But it was to be some time before Crist again savored the sweet taste of political suc- cess. After six attempts, Crist was finally elect- ed as a North Vancouver District councillor. In two of those elections he says he knocked on every single door in the district. Not only was Crist viewed as a trouble- maker to the staid, some would say murky, business of North Vancouver politics, but his communist past came back to haunt him as the eleciorate couldn't come to terms with who ° See Crist page 19