ae

28 hotel rooms, bu
nary a one to rent

COALMONT — This town once had seven churches and
now it can barely support a single bar room, which makes
you wonder how far downhill is down for 2 town of

20,000 people.

At this time of year the bar
room is the only functioning por-
tion of the imposing, three-storey
Coa!mont Hotel. In the middle of
a weckday afternoon the staff
number two, Dwight Picul and his
wife Marianne. Customers number
zero.

-*There are only 79 people still
living here,’ reports Marianne.
“But of course it changes in
summer, we g0 up to a population
of maybe 400 around here.’’

Of the off-season population
she reports 16 are children, some
of whom are bused to Princeton
for school and others to nearby
Tulameen. Tulameen is almost as
deserted as Coalmont but has re-
tained enough humans to qualify
for a school with Grades 1 to 3.

Dwight suggests that Marianne
has miscounted the children, there
are only 14 because a family with
two kids moved away. She says
yes but there’s been one new baby
in Coalmont so the count of 15 is
fair.

Why are Dwight and Marianne
here? Why have they run this
hotel for six years?

It isn’t the money, it’s the
charm. Soon after taking over the
hotel operation, Marianne wrote
her mother “I have finally found
the town for me; only four stop
signs and they're all on the same
corner.”’

Near Stop Sign Junction is a
large sign that reads:

“COALMONT
POPULATION: Varies IN-
DUSTRY: None CHIEF
SPORTS: Sleeping and Day
Dreaming CLIMATE: Hot Cold
Wet Dry at Various Times

COALMONT CAFE AND

STORE
Welcomes You and Wiil Be
Delighted to Serve You.”

Until last year there was
another line added to the welcome
which read ‘Provided You Are
Lucky Enough to Find Us In.”

This has deen removed because
nobody is ever again going to be
lucky enough to find the pro-
prietors in. The cafe and store is
closed, like all the other stores,
churches, jails, brothels, gas
pumps and biacksmith shops.

The hotel has six or eight cans
of beans and a few other groceries
available to the hopelessly im-

Paul
st. Pierre

provident traveller, but that’s all.

There is no cafe, although it is
expected that a portion of the
hotel’s ground floor will be used
for one during tourist season,
which is May 25 to Thanksgiving.

There are also no rooms avail-
able at the Coalmont Hotel. All
those on the third floor were shut
in 1931 when an explosion in the
town’s coal mine killed 45 miners,
a catastrophe that put the great
Blakeburn mine into decline and,
in 1940, death. .

The second-floor rooms were
put off-bounds by government in-
spectors a few years ago because
of one shortcoming or another.

“Occasionally if somebody has
too much to drink in the bar, I
put him to bed upstairs in one of
those rooms, but that’s so he
won't kill himeelf driving back to
Princeton,’’ says Dwight. ‘‘We
don’t charge anything for that
service.””

At the moment not only is no-
body drinking too much at the
bar, nobody is drinking anything.
Marianne takes the opportunity to
offer a tour of the rooms on the
second floor, some of which have
the 1922 wallpaper. .

‘*The women’s rooms are on
the right of the stairs and the
men’s rooms on the left,”’ she
points out.

**What about married people or
other people who weren’t married
but were friendly instead?”

**We don’t know, but they got
together somehow. When Liz
Brown ran the hotel in the ’30s

Arrests made in WV purse thefts

TWO WOMEN face charges after
a West Vancouver Police in-
vestigation into a rash of purse
thefts resulted in arrests April 23.

By Michael Becker
News Reporter

Lower Mainland police are cur-
rently investigating a string of
purses purloincd from schools

’ throughout North and West Van-

couver, Vancouver and Rich-
mond.

The boosted purses often con-
tained credit cards and cheques.

The arrests came when an
employee of the Park Royal South
Royal Bank branch tipped off
police about the (wo suspects, The
make of the vehicle used by the
two was noted and passed on to
police.

Police alerted loca! schools to
be on the lookout for the
suspects, who were then spotted
at Pauline Johnson Elementary

School.

A

Their car, a yellow 1974 Ford
Maverick, was pulled over by
police in the 1800-block of Marine
Drive.

Police subsequently recovered
credit cards taken earlier that day
from a purse stolen at Highlands
Community School in North Van-
couver,

A five-year-old boy and a
three-year-old girl, the children of
one of the suspects, have been
apprehended by police and placed
in the custody of a relative.

Rhonda Beth Gaynor, 26, of
New Westminster, faces three
charges of theft under $1,000, two
charges of uttering a forged
document, two charges of posses-
sion of a stolen credit card, and a
narcotic possession charge.

Police found there were out
standing warrants in effect for the
arrest of Gaynor by police in
Vancouver, Coquitlam and Port
Moody.

Colleen Agnus Sinclair, 31, of
Richmond, is charged with
possession of a narcotic.

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

she was noted for tying cowbells
under the springs of beds which
she rented to newlyweds.””

And what do the 79 inhabitants
of Coalmont do now?

Well, as you might expect that
newborn baby is doing damn all,
but the older kids have good tines
in this lovely, good natured little
corner of the great Otter Valley,
beside the rusting tracks of the
abandoned Kettle Valley rail line.
Here, everybody looks out for one
another and the idea of childresi
being in danger from molesters or
murderers is as remote as the far
side of the moon.

Of the adults, some are retired
and tend their gardens. Some,
who hold four-days-on and four-
days-off jubs, work in Vancouver,
which is now only three hours
driving time distant. At Ieast one
old-timer still makes some doilars
panning gold in the nearby creeks.
Others just get along, somehow.
Land is cheap and so are old
houses. The hotel itself is up for
sale, cheap.

And although the commercial
life of Coalmont is almost extinct
there is, in nearby Tulameen, a
year-round grocery store called the
Trading Post, known to locals as
West Tulameen Mali. But never
mind Tulameen. This is a day for
sitting in Coalmont Hotel, waiting
to see if a customer turns up.

Unique
ideas —

Day

Friday, May 3, 1991 - North Shore News ~ 9
THE DESIRABLE TRADES
ARE AT:
Mercedes-Benz

es
evrth hove

See North Shore News Classified Automotive this issue. |

1375 MARINE DR,N.VAN. _984-9351

FOR SALE BY POSTING
12 RESIDENTIAL BUILDING LOTS

THE CORPORATION
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7 Cul-de-sac Lots - Hixon Place/Hixon Court
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Minimum Acceptable Price $175,000-$180,000

Seaied bids will be accepted until 2:00 p.m. Friday, May 10,
1991. .

Bid packages must be picked up at the District Land
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at 987-7131.

THE HIGHEST OR ANY OFFER WILL NOT
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3
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Sale Ends May 5th/91

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