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REMEMBRANCE DAY is coming, and here is my scoop on it. It is a rare scoop because it is actually useful, since it will Hift your heart and expand your knowledge:

Go see the current exhibit at North Vancouver Museum and Archives. It has a fairly dry title, but don’t be fooled — the exhibits are fascinating, intelligently coor- dinated, excellently displayed, and altogether a credit to museum director Robin Inglis and his highly professional staff.

Homefront: Shipbuilding & the North Vancouver Community, 1939-45 will help father answer the famous question, “What did you do in the war, daddy?”

OK, not many children lisp this question to their daddies any more. Maybe to their granddaddies. Maybe they don’t even know there. was once a war. Time has passed.

But that’s exactly whiy, with the perspective of half a century siuce the Second World War, every (cau- tion! neologism ahead!) North Shorean should see this exhibit. For it will enhance their sense of, and pride in, community.

As curator John Stuart points out, you can either give it “a quick whiz through” — 20 minutes or half an hour would do — or, as some have, spend days going through the ringbinders of histori- cal material that the staff has gath- ered.

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And —— important notice — education curator Shirley Sutherland has invited former ship- yard employees and their families to a gathering at the muscum on Sunday, Nov. 6 from noon to 5 p.m. (the museum will also be open on Remembrance Day).

What, in fact, did North Vancouverites — with help from people in the surrounding area —- do during the war, something beyond sending their young men and women to war, something exclusive?

They built ships.

God, did they build ships.

Especially they built freighters — the ships that carried the muni- tions that were put in the arma-

a

Fronti

NCE ‘THE first wave of guffaws over

the idea of a B.C. penal colony for

repeat violent offenders has receded, its merits will become apparent.

The idea was floated recently by Surrey- Cloverdale MLA Ken Jones, who opined in quotations in the daily press that “if they can't be cured, then maybe you have to take them (violent offenders) out ef society indefi- nitely.” Widespread apreement and applause from all decent foth.

The recent violent deaths of Mindy ‘Tran in Kelowna and Pamela Cameron in Surrey have fired the silent majority's usually slow- burning fuse.

People want criminals to pay real penal- ties; they are sick of criminal rights super- seding victims’ rights.

A penal colony seems perhaps a Draconian step backwards into the dark ages

t war eff

er justice

of criminal justice when rehabilitation of the offender was nol uppermost in the minds of those dealing out the penalties.

And neighbors of the off-shore islands proposed by Mr. Jones — Calvert and Swindle — have already raised concerns over living in the vicinity of a penal colony for vio- lent criminals.

But the concept of separating offenders from society and forcing them to fend for themselves in the harsh realities of nature is not new. Native Indians have used the same system of banishing wreng-doers to deserted istands armed only with the bare necessities,

Such a sentence gives the offender plenty of time to consider tife and death; to consider the basies of survival far from the mollycod- dling of the public teat. It is tonic stuff with a strony shot of real justice. It's worthy of more than knee-jerk dismissal.

ve oye CL

ments that fell on the evil that Hitler built.

Yes, kiddies, just yards or metres away from where today's generations loll, lunch and joiter at Lonsditle Quay, sweating men —~ and, of more lasting social signifi- tance, Women —- toiled to build an amazing 164 of Canada's 312 wartime cargo ships of 10,000 tons each.

They were built by Burrard Drydock, which becarne Canada's biggest shipyard during the war, and North Vancouver Ship Repairs.

The effort was colossal. John Stuart says that, based on research by Bob Faulkner, it's believed that 24,000 different peopte worked for Burrard on its 18 1/2-acre site in the 100-block East Esplanade.

There is also a surviving wartime fetter from Burrard owner Clarence Wallace in which Wallace remarks that he had 12,000 people employed at the moment.

And North Van Ship Repairs, west of Lonsdale, a smull and struggling builder of wooden boats in the 1930s, ballooned into an impressive ship-builder with 9.500 employces.

So there were well above 20,000 workers building the cargo ships, plus some minesweepers and Corvettes, at a time when the North Shore’s population was only 8,900.

Of course many employees trundled over the old Second Narrows Bridge from Vancouver

and beyond,

The exhibit not only traces the explosive growth of these compa- nies but places them in the larger context af the war and shows their enormous effect on the community.

Most nostalgic for me is the dis- play of the rivetters’ gear — forge, funnel-shaped rivet-catchers, rivet- guns, rare items today when rivet- ting has been replaced by welding in ship-building. George MacPherson of the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union provided some of these “antiques.”

There were 400,000 rivets in each of these cargo ships, and a whole rivetiers’ culture around the process,

My brother Gary, at age 16 or so, worked in the war industry and Estill remember his distaste for catching the rivets hat trom the forge.

Also evocative: the “girls” of the shipyards. There are pictures of hundreds of them, young, smiling, strong. A mannequin is dressed is a plant outfit of the day, complete with V-for-Victory emblem.

After the war Burrard Dry Docks absorbed North Van Ship Repairs, Later it became Versatile Pacific. A couple of years ago, after the Polar 8 icebreaker pro- gram was scrapped, it collapsed. Its property remains closed and deserted. Only one of the hundreds of cargo ships built on the North Shore, the Cape Breton, survives

; onthe West Coast.

An era has vanished.

rt | Spike the

Spandex

Dear Editor:

Pam writag you regarding your recent change of the Sunshine Girl, As 1 flip through what | believed to be acommunity and family-ori- ented paper, | am struck by a huge picture of flesh with an udded two pieces af spandex on it.

T have always found the Sunshine Girls to be quite a joke but now I find them totally degrading.

I can appreciate an attrac. tive person but your mew pre- sentation is simply trashy. | see no reason for having half- naked women tell us a bit about themselves — who really cares?

The rest of your paper is interesting and informative, but I do not see what category the Sunshine Girl fits in.

These women are choosing to do this, which I cannot protest, but I do think that if you must include this in your paper, the modest (your previ- ous) approach is more accept- able and respectable for a paper that “reaches every door on the North Shere!” Jessica K. Mercier West Vancouver:

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