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WEST VANCOUVER HISTORICAL SOCIETY September 1996 AND THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS Those Crazy Days of Summer The recent sport display of the 1920’s in Lawson House reminded me of my early days in West Van and our enjoyment of the outdoors. Our town has always been a summer resort. In the very early days the beach was lined with tents on platforms. In 1919 our family, Fred and Janet Hadwin, and the three of us children were fortunate to locate on acreage at 11th and Mathers and very quickly we were out hiking, swimming and berry-picking as the other early residents did. Mathers Avenue from 11th to 3rd was made of planks and extended to the sawmills in that area. Inglewood avenue was planked too, from the mill at 17th to 11th street. Other roads were narrow gravel lanes at best, with trees meeting overhead. Neighbours were few. The Duncan MacDonalds shared our half-block of property. Police Commissioner Bell and family lived across Mathers from our little house at 1046. Mr. Bell used to hide Easter eggs each year for us all to hunt in his tall grassed property. The Clements were next door to Mr. Bell with their varied and tasty apples to sample as often as we wished. Mrs. Albin lived on Kings avenue and kept goats. She cut skunk cabbage flowers for her living room; how beautiful, but oh, so odorous! How lucky we were to live in West Van in those days, -no supervised, organized, planned recreation in our day. We found our own fim and were free to roam as we pleased. Hollybum School closure in June was a signal for true excitement - a whole summer ahead. Off came our school skirts and blouses and into our khaki bloomers and middies for the next two months. Shoes and socks were discarded and our bare feet soon toughened to the texture and endurance of leather. Much time we spent exploring the creeks along Mathers, Sisters’ Creek and Brothers’ Creek, both sources of minnows to be caught on our bent-pin hooks. The clay from the banks made good pottery which we fashioned into cups and bowls. We swam in any deep pools we could find and picnicked happily on our egg sandwiches and Mum’s raspberry vinegar. Our neighbourhood gang, my sister Betty and I, plus the Boshier girls, Dorothy and Ida, Mary Bradshaw, Effie and Betty Vickery and Kathy Pollock, called ourselves the Active Aces and dared each other into dangerous activities. We climbed out on decayed and burned logging bridges, slid down logging chutes, jumped off roofs, climbed on the backs of moving Capilano railway cars and climbed the tallest trees. One of our favourite hikes was to Hadden Hall, the present site of the Capilano Golf and Country clubhouse. Mr. Hadden and his unwilling bride had abandoned the fully-furnished house and formal Japanese garden in this wilderness. Year by year we watched it deteriorate until finally someone burned it down. Every Sunday we all walked to the Cemetery Pages By: Barbara Johnson^ Contributions Editor begging Effie and Betty’s mother Mrs. Vickery to accompany us. What super Irish tales she told, then scared us silly with ghost-stories. In the evening, after bringing our cow Olive into the bam, we would play Run Sheep Run, enjoying our new street light at 11th and Mathers as home base. Electricity was just put in use here in 1925. Ani-Ani-I-Over was the popular game in which we tossed the ball back and forth over our roof top. Of course we picked blackberries and blueberries all over our hillside, often meeting bears as we shared their food supply. We steered clear of mother bears with cubs. Sentinel Hill, named Baby Mountain then, had only one house on it. We had all that wilderness to ourselves in which to roam and explore. We skipped as we chanted J\vo Little Dicky Birds Sitting on a Wall and many other ditties. We played Peggy with two sticks and a stone. We played Knife with an open-bladed utensil tossed to land point down in the grass. Many days we spent at Ambleside Beach. We would have it all to ourselves, build a bonfire at supper time and stagger home, waterlogged, at bedtime. All this activity was generally unsupervised. We could all swim well, usually by ten, but all of us by twelve years of age. Treasure hunts w«e all day activities as one half of our Aces went ahead several hours to plant clues and a final treasure. As my sister and I delivered milk to the neighbours in Betty’s little wagon we didn’t realize that our fi^ life would disappear in a few years; that West Vancouver would grow to be the crowded suburb of Vancouver that it has become. B. JOHNSON iiisMi * Early Days on the Beach at Ambleside