Editorially speaking...
Welcome to a new year—hopefully it’ll be a better one than 2021 was for many, I’m sure.
It can be a challenge for me, sometimes, to find good news in all that’s going on around us, but it’s there if we look hard enough.
Here’s one that pleases me, at least. “A treasure trove of old CBC recordings, saved from the dumpster,” the Vancouver Sun reported at year-end. Back in 1973, when the CBC moved into its present-day Hastings Street location, Vancouver, sound engineer Alf Spence heard “they were pitching old reel-to-reel tapes” to save space.
Spence thought they had cultural and historical value so dug into the dumpster and rescued them. He retired in 1983 and died in 2014, his son finding the old tapes and some recording equipment in his effects. Recently retired, Gary decided to digitize them in memory of his father and to “spark an interest in the CBC or an archive to take over the collection”.
If you think about this for a moment, you’ll readily understand how listening to a speaker telling his or her own story is so much more compelling than when they’re quoted in print. (For me of all people, to admit to this is a big, big concession, you understand.)
To give one personal example: I’ve written about my father’s serving in the North Atlantic during the Second World aboard the Canadian destroyer HMCS St. Laurent when she rescued survivors of the torpedoed SS Arandora Star. I quoted him for the most part—but, in print, it pales alongside hearing him speaking into my tape recorder.
It’s as if he’s in the room with you, chatting over a coffee or a beer. You can hear the emotion in his voice as that event obviously affected him for life. To achieve that effect with the printed word, well... I bless Gary for his efforts to find those tapes, the contents of which I’m unaware, a good home. I’d love to know what’s on some of them...
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So much for my upbeat approach to a new year. A truly sad ending for 2021 and the start of 2022 is the ongoing deconstruction of B.C.’s oldest active tugboat, the famous Sea Lion, ca 1905, by order of the Coast Guard who claim it was in unsafe condition and a threat to the environment.
A charge that has been heatedly denied by some knowledgeable mariners, I should point out.
B.C.’s oldest working tugboat, S.S. Sea Lion is no more. --www.Pinterest.com
Whatever, the damage is all but done as you read this. Her wheelhouse equipment, most of it original, was stolen while she was anchored in Maple Bay. Now she’s on the weighs at a Nanaimo shipyard and demolition has commenced.
For what consolation there is, Jim Drummond, project manager for Canadian Maritime Engineering, says it “feels terrible,” but he has a job to do, and as as much of historical value as possible will be saved.
Among her many, many claims to historical significance, Sea Lion participated in the infamous Komagata Maru incident of 1914 when hundreds of would-be Sikh immigrants were callously turned away by provincial and federal authorities despite a Supreme Court order ruling that they qualified for admittance.
It was Sea Lion that served as a water-taxi to immigration and armed police officers when they attempted to board the Maru in Vancouver Harbour. And it was Sea Lion that, in company of the Canadian cruiser HMCS Rainbow, escorted the rejected immigrant ship back to sea.
I could go on and on but not today; suffice it to say that if ever a B.C. vessel qualified for preservation, Sea Lion is it. What an opportunity lost! With the growing likelihood that the B.C. Maritime Museum will finally have the perfect waterside location in the old CPR Marine Building in Victoria’s Inner Harbour, a seaworthy and operating Sea Lion would have made the perfect combo.
Ah, but that would cost money, of course, and we have so many more important things on our plate, like trashing the Gold Rush exhibit and mothballing the third floor of the Royal B.C. Museum, to name one (or is that two).
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Speaking of the RBC: Just when I began to think they don’t do anything right any more, CHEK-TV reported just before Christmas that the provincial museum plans to share “more of its massive collection and knowledge with the farthest reaches of the province by making more travelling exhibits”.
According to travelling exhibits coordinator Kate Kerr, the RBC has “literally millions of artifacts and so much information and knowledge that we want to share...” She has the perhaps unenviable job, at this time of year and with never-ending COVID concerns, of personally loading one of the trucks used in the program and setting out for smaller, isolated communities.
Of particular importance is the ‘Our living Languages’ program which deals with endangered Indigenous languages. Also touring the province is the ‘Gold Mountain Exhibit’ which tells of Chinese pioneers’ participation in provincial gold rushes.
Physically transporting artifacts, some of which are irreplaceable, must be a major challenge. They must “hold up in a truck because I’m literally driving thee things over bumpy roads..” They not only have to be packed well for transit but must be easy to unload and set up for display.
I wonder how many private antique collectors would care to take some of their most prized and fragile treasures on the road and to repeatedly handle them?
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Finally, for today, I must announce the passing of the Chronicles feature, 100 Years Ago.
A scaled-down version of the front page of the Cowichan Leader, it has run faithfully for the past year and a-half. It has always been a time consumer but the death knell is the fact I no longer have ready access to hard copies of the historic Duncan weekly in my own library.
As of 1922, I’m missing several bound volumes which would necessitate my accessing the Leader on microfilm at the Cowichan Valley Museum Archives on the third floor of City Hall.
In short, that just doesn’t fly and, sad as I am to admit the fact, only once—once—has a reader commented upon something he read in this feature. So goodbye, 100 Years Ago. I learned a lot about what life was like in the Cowichan Valley a century ago and found it quite enlightening to see how much and how dramatically things have changed over a century.
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