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September 1995 WEST VANCOUVER HISTORICAL SOCIETY Pages AND THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS Heritage Week â€" February 1990 Sitting here in the old West Vancouver Ferry Ticket office at the foot of 14th Street, I am steeped in memories. This is Heritage Week and as a member of the Historical Society I am helping to man the recently restored building. I never spent much time in this office in the old days. It was too smelly, smoky and mouldy. Only the warmth of its big potbellied stove was appreciated. If it had looked then as it does now - relined, painted, well-lit and clean -1 would have enjoyed much more the frequent searching for lost umbrellas and raincoats, the usual reason for being here. It is easy, as I shut my eyes, to be carried back to my first trip to West Van with my Dad when I was five years old. Dad was coming from Burnaby to clear our acreage at 11th and Mathers and I was taken along for the day. I got a big thrill out of our half-hour trip on the Doncella and looked forward to playing in the woods as Dad worked. I couldn’t realize at that By: Barbara Johnson, Written for Heritage Week 1990. time that West Vancouver was to be my home for most of the rest of my life. Occasionally Mother would have tea in the tearooms next door and my sister and I would enjoy the rare treat of an ice cream cone as we waited here. Sometimes we would mark hopscotch squares on the old floor with chalk filched from our classroom at Hollybum School. This old building was part of the excitement of going to town, an unusual occurrence in our lives. Usually only at Christmas would we travel to Vancouver to attend the pageant at the old Pantages Theatre where Woodwards sponsored a wonderful vaudeville show. We would sit here and talk about the coming treat as we waited for the ferry. Those times seem more real than today as I bring myself back to the present with a start and rise to welcome interested visitors. Memories of My Cannery Days â€" Summer 1945 Cannery Days was to be the next Museum exhibit. That rang a bell. But it wasn’t until Jacquie asked, “Does anyone have a contact associated with the Cannery?” that I gave it a second thought. At 161 had worked a summer at the Cannery but I was sure I couldn't be of any help. It did start me thinking and slowly the memories came back, each one triggering more. I had no trouble hiring on with labour still in short supply; just arrange for an employment book. I joined a small crew of white labourors working alongside the predominantly Chinese work force under a foreman that I have trouble visualizing now, except that he was short in stature, sarcastic and had little patience with the inexperienced. I quickly found that our crew was there to take care of any work that the Chinese found distasteful or outside their job description. They provided routine labour for long established procedures. Deviations and disputes always ended up in a high pitched shouting match, only settled upon the arrival of their agent, a young Chinese, who drove around in a fancy Lincoln roadster, seldom had a shirt on and was rumoured to be paid so much an hour out of each Chinese crew member’s wages. In the canning operation my job was moving the cans of fish, as they spewed off the canning line, into the steam retorts for cooking. TTie cans were placed on metal trays, packed many tiers high on wheeled carts, and were moved on a narrow rail track into the steam retorts. Half a dozen carts or so, end to end; the hatch was then locked in place and the steam applied. After cooking, the hatch was thrown open and I would pull out each cart in turn by grabbing the cart axle with a long metal hook with steam blasting in my face from the open retort. The last cart, deep in the retort, was particularly unpleasant. From there the carts moved to a cleaning bath; a large tank of strong hydroxide solution that removed traces of fish residue before labelling. Each tray of cans was hoisted with the aid of a By: Waring Pentiand primitive rope and pulley system and dunked, sometimes repeatedly, in the tank until clean. I wore gloves and looked the other way when the trays hit the solution; safety measures to protect the eyes and hands from the corrosive hydroxide. Details escape me, though I do remember the labellers. All Chinese girls, mostly young and faster than I could believe; all paid on piece work basis. Nearly all the help was Chinese, many off them living ‘on site’ in a bunk house. One exception was Simon; an older fellow we believed to be Russian, whose main chore was unloading salmon from the hold of the fish boats. Often up to his knees in fish, he had a personal aroma that clung to him. He never seemed to wash and could clear the lunch room by just entering. The Cannery smell was all pervasive and as the summer progressed my jeans took on the unsavoury aroma. My mother refused to wash them and wouldn’t let me in the house with them on. By the end of the summer they would stand on their own when I took them off in the shed. Many of the memories are fragmented. Herring arriving on truck trailers, frozen in forty pound fiats for processing when firesh fish were unavailable. Frozen herring tied together on the ends of a twenty foot string and fed to two different sea gulls. A sea gull flying oH after swallowing two and a half frozen herring, with half a herring protruding from its beak. The Chinese labourer pulling herring fillets across the catwalk to the smoke house with the seagull filching from the topmost tray on the cart. Several Spring salmon, selected for their size, laying on the wharf for a purpose never explained, all of them fifty pounds or more. And so many more images, each one triggering a torrent of others too numerous to mention. I for one look forward to the ‘Cannery Days’ exhibit with great enthusiasm. But, beware! Don't get caught in the flood!