Chronology Continued
[1757
- 1884] [1885 - 1891] [1892
- 1899]
[1900 - 1905] [1906
- 1908] [1909] [1910]
[1911] [1912]
[1913] [1914]
[1915] [1916]
[1917] [1918]
[1919] [1920]
[1921] [1922]
[1923] [1924]
[1925] [1926]
[1927] [1928]
[1929] [1930]
[1931] [1932]
[1933] [1934]
[1935] [1936]
[1937] [1938]
[1939] [1940]
[1941] [1942]
[1943] [1944]
[1945] [1946]
[1947] [1948]
[1949] [1950]
[1951] [1952]
[1953] [1954]
[1955] [1956] [1957]
[1958]
[1959] [1960]
[1961] [1962]
[1963] [1964]
[1965]
[1966] [1967]
[1968]
[1969] [1970]
[1971] [1972]
[1973] [1974]
[1975] [1976]
[1977] [1978]
[1979] [1980]
[1981] [1982]
[1983] [1984]
[1985] [1986]
[1987] [1988]
[1989] [1990]
[1991] [1992]
[1993] [1994]
1955
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You'll note that this year includes events listed under “Also
in . . .“ These are events for which we don't have a specific
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January 10 An agreement ratified by the notaries
society and the law society—they had had disputes in the past
over who could handle what—stipulated that need for a notarial
appointment would arise when a vacancy occurred through resignation,
retirement or death. The agreement capped the number of notaries
at 330, the number practising on January 31, 1955. The notaries’
seals now were anchored to designated districts. (Notaries in Greater
Vancouver hold more than half the 322 notarial appointments permitted
by statute in 81 notarial districts in British Columbia.)
February 3 CKLG AM 1070 signed on with 1000
watts in North Vancouver. The ‘LG’ stood for Lions Gate.
The station was owned by the Gibson Brothers, the logging family.
Up against booming 50-kilowatt KNX Los Angeles on the same frequency,
CKLG's signal didn't go much past south Vancouver after dark.
February 27 Teddy (Thadeous Sylvester) Lyons,
BCER conductor, died in Vancouver, aged about 66. He was born c.
1889 in Portage La Prairie, Man. He came to Vancouver as a boy,
at age 14 left school and worked at odd jobs. In 1910 he was hired
as a BCER conductor. Teddy served for 40 years, 39 of them as a
“spieler” announcing Vancouver highlights aboard the open
Observation Car #124. Someone once calculated Teddy had travelled
more than 580,000 miles (928,000 k/m) around the city. In 1944 a
wartime manpower and electric shortage caused BCER to halt operations
for one summer. The tours ended in September 1950, and Teddy retired
in 1951.
March 7 Margaret Jean Gee was the first woman
of Chinese descent to be called to the British Columbia bar.
March 13 Broadcaster Jim Fraser was born.
March 15 The City of Langley was incorporated
out of what had been the Langley Prairie area of the Township. “The
City of Langley,” Bob Groeneveld writes in The Greater Vancouver
Book, “was born of dissent. Township reeve (mayor) George
Brooks's adamant ‘Not a nickel for streetlights for Langley
Prairie!’ in the early 1950s became the watchword for discontented
businessmen who—some of them since the early 1930s—had
been fighting to secede from the Township. The dissidents were upset
that the political clout of the Langley Prairie community, quickly
becoming the commercial and business centre of Langley, did not
match its economic importance (Langley Prairie accounted for 20
per cent of Langley's tax base). Rumblings had been heard as far
back as the early '30s, but a significant move toward Langley Prairie
independence came Dec. 7th, 1950, when Langley Board of Trade president
Richard Langdon publicly supported secession. A secessionist campaign
was led by a committee of prominent residents and businessmen, who
succeeded in drawing an 85 per cent vote of Langley Prairie's approximately
900 taxpayer to their side on September 24, 1954. Brooks's words,
emphasizing the disparity between tax dollars collected and spent
in Langley Prairie, had provided the final wedge to officially split
four square miles, with a total population of 2,025, off Langley
Township to create Langley City on March 15th, 1955.”
March Reporter Ray Munro, frustrated at the
Province’s refusal to print his allegations about Vancouver’s
police chief Walter Mulligan, quit that paper and became the “Vancouver
editor” of Toronto-based scandal sheet Flash Weekly.
See the June 15 and December entries below.
April 24 A new era in rail travel in Canada
began April 24, 1955. The Canadian Pacific Railway introduced The
Canadian, an “ultra-modern, lightweight, highly attractive
stainless-steel streamlined train.” The train would offer the
world’s longest dome ride: 2,881.2 miles from Vancouver to
Montreal. (4,637 k/m).
For a fuller description of this unique service,
see this article.
Also April 24 “Amidst flashbulbs and
the tears of fans” the last streetcar ran in Vancouver (it
was on the Hastings route), ending 65 years of street railway service.
Now the trolley bus was king. One of the passengers on that final
run was Henry Ewert, an English teacher, who would also ride the
interurbans on their final day in 1958. Ewert has published several
excellent books on public transit in this area. Especially appealing
is 2003's Vancouver’s Glory Years: Public Transit 1890-1915,
wonderfully and profusely illustrated, and written with Heather
Conn. See this
site.
May 10 Tommy Burns died in Vancouver, aged
74. He was the only Canadian to have been world heavyweight boxing
champion. BC sports writer Tom Hawthorn has written, in part: “Burns,
who had been born Noah Brusso in Hanover, Ontario, found religion
later in life in California. He denounced the brutality of the sweet
science of bruising, and apologized publicly for having made racist
comments to [heavyweight champion Jack] Johnson in the ring.”
After retiring from the ring, Burns operated a pub
in London and a speakeasy in New York. Then, he renounced the sinful
life and embarked upon the sawdust trail as an evangelist. On one
of his evangelical tours, he took a side-trip to Vancouver to visit
a friend, John Westway, and he died there of a heart attack. They
found on his body a calling card that read, “Tom Burns, demonstrator
of Universal Love.” He was buried in Plot 3, Grave 451 of the
Balsam Section of Ocean View Cemetery in Burnaby. Only four people
attended the service—a boxing fan and his wife, plus two grave
diggers. The grave had no marker for six years, until a sportswriter's
campaign financed a plaque. And see this
site.
June 3 Canadian Pacific Airlines inaugurated
the first service between Vancouver and Amsterdam, in the Netherlands,
over the North Pole. The 4,825-mile (7,765 k/m) journey took 18
hours.
June 15 Flash Weekly hit the streets
in Vancouver with sensational charges by Vancouver editor Ray Munro
about illegal doings by the city’s police chief, Walter Mulligan.
Anticipating heavy demand, Flash printed 10,000 extra copies.
They were gone within hours.
June 24 Detective Sergeant Len Cuthbert, implicated
in the Mulligan scandal, shot himself. He survived, and would later
testify against Mulligan. Not much later, Police Superintendent
Harry Whelan shot himself. Whelan, who didn’t survive, was
to have testified at the Mulligan inquiry.
Len Cuthbert, still recovering from his self-inflicted
gunshot wound, would shock the inquiry with a nervous recitation
of bootleggers’ payoffs made and split with Mulligan. Equally
devastating was the testimony of Detective Sergeant Bob Leatherdale,
an honest cop who not only refused to go along with the payoff scheme,
but reported it to the city prosecutor, a judge and McGeer's successor
as mayor, Charles Thompson—all of whom, according to Flash
editor Ray Munro, sat on the report.
June 25 Dave Mowat, now CEO of VanCity Credit
Union, was born in Calgary.
June 30 Joe Paopao, future BC Lions quarterback
and coach, was born in Honolulu. He grew up in Oceanside, California,
would start with the Lions in 1979.
July 2 George Albert McGuire, pioneer dentist
and MLA, died in Vancouver, aged 84. He was born April 7, 1871 in
Mount Forest, Ont. A graduate of the Royal College of Dental Surgeons
(Toronto) and U. of Maryland (DDS, 1892), he came to Vancouver in
1892 and engaged in the practice of dentistry until his retirement
in 1951. He was a member of the Provincial Dental Council in 1905
and in 1906 was President of the British Columbia Dental Association.
Dr. McGuire was active in real estate and investments. In 1903 he
was elected president of the BC section of the Conservative Association
of Canada. In 1907 he was elected MLA for Vancouver, launching a
long political career. As minister of education he influenced the
creation of UBC.
July 10 Michael Saba, silk merchant, died
in Los Angeles, aged about 94. He was born c. 1861 in Beirut, Lebanon.
“The Saba family,” Constance Brissenden writes, “arrived
in Nanaimo in 1888, then moved to Vancouver. Mike opened Saba Brothers
on West Hastings with younger brother Alexander (born c. April 7,
1881 in Beirut, died in 1970 in Vancouver) in November 1903. Two
years later, the store moved to the 500 block Granville. Mike retired
in 1921, selling his shares to Alex. By 1940, Saba's was the largest
retail house in Western Canada specializing in silks. Although hit
by shortages in WWII, the business survived. In 1942, there was
a riot when 500 women stampeded the store to buy 300 pairs of nylon
stockings (no one was hurt). In 1947, the company built a new five-storey
$250,000 store at 622 Granville. In 1954 Saba’s opened a Victoria
outlet. Alex's three sons, Edgar, Clarence and Arnold, later managed
the business.”
July 17 Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California.
A six-mile-long traffic jam ensued.
Also July 17 The first suicide leap off the
Granville Street Bridge, opened a year-and-a-half before. A 69-year-old
American leaped to his death.
July 19 Judy Garland, 33, performed in Vancouver.
A 12-year-old Vancouver girl, Connie Brent, was among the more than
5,000 fans in Exhibition Forum for the show, sponsored by B'nai
B'rith. Connie met with the star after the show and told her she
wanted to learn how to sing “just half as good as you.”
July 22 Annacis Island, the first industrial
park in Canada, was officially opened. The 1,200-acre island had
been owned since 1951 by Grosvenor International, owned in turn
by the Duke of Westminster. More than 1,300 government, civic and
business leaders were on hand. The duke died (July 19, 1953, aged
74) before Annacis got going, but Grosvenor Estates—run by
Lt. Col. Gerald and Lt. Col. Robert Grosvenor, beneficiaries of
the duke's family trust—proceeded with the plans. The Vancouver
Sun, for July 21 (Page 8) reported that one factory was under
construction, “with the possibility of a number of other firms
also moving in.”
Today, the island is home to a variety of industrial
concerns and a major sewage treatment facility. Prior to industrial
development, the island had been used for farming and fishing. It’s
hard to tell it’s an island these days: the land is covered
by buildings, warehouses, roads and bridges.
The Grosvenor brothers were heirs to a very long
tradition. That 1955 Sun story goes on to say: “The
organization goes back 900 years in British commercial history and
has built holdings of vast commercial and residential estates. The
Grosvenor Estates include 600 acres in the heart of London, the
Mayfair Estate across from Hyde Park and the Belgravia Estate, across
from Victoria Station and Buckingham Palace.”
July A recording by Bill Haley and the Comets,
titled Rock Around the Clock, landed on CJOR disc jockey
Red Robinson’s desk. You know the rest.
August 26 The Vancouver Tourist Association
became the Greater Vancouver Tourist Association. Vancouver Sun
Director R. Rowe Holland told the Tourist Association he was “astounded”
to find that information centre attendants at Stanley Park knew
“nothing whatever” about the background of historic sites
in the Greater Vancouver area. The Sun story also noted that
member Jim Hughes stressed the need for Vancouver to have a full-time
convention bureau.
And the same story noted that the “question
most frequently asked by visitors on tours of the city is: ‘Where
are the Mounties?’”
September 21 Retired lumberman Leon J. Koerner
set up the Leon
and Thea Koerner Foundation with funding of nearly $1
million. The Foundation finances educational, cultural and charitable
projects.
September The Raven, UBC’s literary
magazine, first appeared.
Also September A plaque was installed near
the southeast corner of Cambie and Smithe in Vancouver to commemorate
the 75th anniversary of Imperial Oil. That site was chosen because
it was the location of Canada's first gas station, opened in or
around 1907 by Imperial Oil. The plaque isn’t there now. We
don’t know where it is. If you know, tell
us here.
The city’s first automobile was a Stanley Steamer,
which arrived in 1899. Its first internal combustion auto came in
1904. The growth in demand for the latter led to the need for the
gas station.
In a speech delivered at the plaque’s unveiling,
city archivist Major J.S. Matthews (who in 1907 was working for
Imperial Oil) recalled how that station began: “There had arrived
in Vancouver a queer-looking vehicle called an automobile.
We had read about them in magazines. One day the telephone rang.
The call came from the Hastings Sawmill and the speaker asked me
if we had any gasoline which could be used in automobiles.
“The office boy replied that we had three kinds:
one was '74'-brand Baume gasoline and was supplied to drug stores,
who sold it to ladies for cleaning their gloves; the second kind
was deodorized stove gasoline, used in plumber's firepots for heating
soldering irons; and the third kind was benzine, used for dissolving
lacquer in the salmon canneries along the Fraser to prevent the
salmon cans from rusting.
“The office boy went to the warehouse and told
the foreman, Bud Mulligan, to send a four-gallon can of ‘74'
down to John Hendry, manager of the mill. That can was the first
gasoline ever sold in British Columbia for motorcar use . . .”
We haven’t found a specific day for the opening
of the service station, but Major Matthews says it opened in or
near 1907. Read the rest
of the story here.
October 1 Tour guide extraordinaire Jeff Veniot
(vee-no) was born.
October 3 Frank Mackenzie Ross was sworn in
as B.C.’s lieutenant-governor, succeeding Clarence Wallace.
October 6 Won Alexander Cumyow, court interpreter,
died in Vancouver, aged 94. “He was born,” Constance Brissenden
writes, “March 27, 1861 in Fort Douglas on Harrison Lake, the
first Chinese-Canadian born in Canada. He moved to New Westminster
as a boy, and later studied law. He was appointed a court interpreter
in 1888, and served as the official Vancouver City Police court
interpreter from 1904 to 1936. Cumyow spoke several Chinese dialects,
also Chinook. He was a community leader with the Chinese Empire
Reform Association and other groups, and a president of the Chinese
Benevolent Society. He cast his first vote in 1890. He saw the vote
taken away from the Chinese, but lived to see it returned in 1947.”
October 24 Vancouver police chief Walter Mulligan
asked to be relieved of his duties.
November 4 Kingsford-Smith Elementary School
opened in Vancouver, named for Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, the
Australian aviator who was the first to fly the Pacific. The school
got its name at the suggestion of city archivist Major J.S. Matthews,
who recalled that Kingsford-Smith briefly lived here as a child
with his family. He was lost at sea in 1935.
November 26 The first Grey Cup game was played
in Vancouver. The two competing teams were Doug Walker’s Montreal
Alouettes and Frank ‘Pop’ Ivy’s Edmonton Eskimos.
Edmonton won 34-19.
November 30 Robert Winters, federal works
minister in the St. Laurent government, laid the cornerstone of
the new post office on West Georgia. It will open March 14, 1958.
Also November 30 On St. Andrew's Day in 1955,
21 Scottish Canadians groups finally opened the United Scottish
Cultural Centre at Fir and 12th Avenue in Vancouver. (In July, 1986,
the centre would move into a new home at 8886 Hudson in Marpole.)
December Ex-police chief Walter Mulligan left
for the USA, while the commission of inquiry into his activities
was still going on. He got a job as a limousine-bus dispatcher at
Los Angeles airport. The last day of the Mulligan inquiry would
be January 27, 1956. The findings will be reported on in the 1956
chronology.
Also in 1955
Lions Gate Bridge was sold to the provincial government
for $6 million, about half its appraised value.
St. Andrew's Hall was chartered by the Province of
British Columbia as a theological college. Buildings were completed
in 1957 on land close to the heart of the UBC campus that the university
leased to the college for 999 years.
The Trinity Baptist Church was built at West 49th
and Granville.
The BC Electric Building went up at Burrard Street,
the first high-rise office building south of Georgia. “The
dynamic collaboration between BC Electric chair Dal Grauer,”
architectural historian Harold Kalman has written, “and forward-thinking
architect Ned Pratt (ably assisted by Ron Thom and others in his
office) produced a tapered, lozenge-shaped tower, whose plan placed
every desk no farther than 15 feet from a window and natural light
(a poor advertisement for the power utility!). The floors are cantilevered
from the central concrete service core like branches from a tree,
with only slender perimeter columns offering additional support.
The blue, green, and black mosaic tiles (by B.C. Binning) are an
integral part of the design.” It would later become the BC
Hydro Building, is now a condo complex called Electra.
The Workmen’s Compensation Board opened a new
$1.5 million Rehabilitation Centre next to its head office in Vancouver.
Lansdowne race track, which was sold to the B.C.
Turf and Country Club in 1945, and which closed in 1949, opened
again. It would permanently close in 1960.
The laying of gas pipes began in Surrey as B.C. Electric
promised natural gas distribution for the Fraser Valley at Vancouver
prices. At Port Mann B.C. Electric built the “largest gas turbine
in the world” to generate electricity from natural gas.
Cloverdale changed over to dial telephones.
Fort Langley was established as a National Historic
Park, and reconstruction began. The storehouse was the only surviving
building and was restored as the trading store. It is possibly the
oldest intact structure in B.C. (1840)
Andy Paul, Squamish native leader, was honored by
Pope Pius XII for his contribution to the Catholic Church and to
the native people of Canada.
George Adams, contractor, died. He built the Carnegie
Library at Main and Hastings, early parts of the Vancouver General
Hospital, and the W.H. Malkin warehouse, now the Old Spaghetti Factory.
He bought lot 492 at Tunstall Bay, built a house and moved there
with his family in 1939. In 1950 he built a summer camp for Vancouver
Sun carriers on the property. It was named Camp Gates in honor
of the Sun’s circulation manager Herb Gates.
The CPR announced a plan to create the Oakridge community.
“In postwar Vancouver,” Michael Kluckner has written,
“a new style of suburbia became fashionable—wider streets,
open landscaping, and low-lying, wood-sided bungalows and split-levels.
In the heyday of this style, the CPR planned to subdivide the 276
acres bounded by Oak, Cambie, 41st and 57th. The Oakridge community
featured 80-foot-wide single-family housing lots, many on curving
streets, and a small apartment area, next to which was proposed
a large shopping mall with Woodward's Department Store as the anchor
tenant.” (That mall would become Oakridge, opened in 1959.)
“In 1942,” Ed Starkins has written, “wartime
housing shortages prompted the federal government to issue an order
in council allowing Shaughnessy homes to be split up into smaller
units. In 1955, when the order in council expired, the Shaughnessy
Heights Property Owners' Association led the campaign to return
to the pre-war period of single family homes. Eventually, the provincial
government decided that it would not change the status of existing
multiple family dwellings, but that any properties that lapsed into
single family use for more than a month would be zoned that way
permanently.”
The brothers of the Benedictine Order, who had resided
since 1939 in Fairacres—built in 1910 by Grace and Henry Ceperley—left
and moved to their present home at Westminster Abbey, Mission. (Fairacres
has been the home since 1967 of the Burnaby Art Gallery.)
The Derwent Way Bridge (low-level, road/rail from
New Westminster, Annacis Channel, Queensborough, Lulu Island) was
built. The low-level bridge carried two highway lanes and a separate
rail track.
The Italian weekly newspaper L'Eco d'Italia
was founded.
UBC’s Alma Mater Society launched the Brock
Hall Art Collection. This collection (some of the works of which
had been stolen or vandalized) may now be found in the Student Union
Building Art Gallery.
Writes Tom Hawthorn: “In 1955, the Rev. E.C.
Pappert flipped through a copy of the [UBC student newspaper] Ubyssey
before pronouncing it ‘the vilest rag you can imagine.’
Of course, the student staff of the offending journal merrily adopted
the clergyman's slur as a motto. To this day, it is used as a recruitment
come-on.”
The Knights of Pythias Order began to financially
assist organizations treating and fighting cerebral palsy in the
lower mainland. They are contributors to the Pacific Riding for
Developing Abilities organization. See this
site.
Radio CKMO changed its call letters to C-FUN.
CBUT (the CBC’s two-year-old television station)
presented its first televised drama, The Vise, a one-act
tragedy (1910) by Pirandello. It starred Derek Ralston, Peter Mannering,
Valerie Cooter and Rae Brown, who would later be one of the cast
of the long-running CBC series The Beachcombers.
KCTS—an educational commercial-free station
based in Seattle—began transmitting 20 hours of programming
a week on Channel 9. (In 1966 KCTS would join 75 other stations,
forming National Educational Television, later renamed the Public
Broadcasting Service: PBS.)
The Princess Louise (II), built in 1921 for
the CPR's northern service by Wallace Shipyard, was sold to become
a restaurant in Long Beach, California, where she sank in 1990.
The White Pass & Yukon Route, whose narrow-gauge
railway connected Skagway, Alaska with Whitehorse in Yukon, became
the first company in the world to build a specialized cellular container
ship and custom-designed rail cars to handle containers. The concept
had been developed in the railway’s Vancouver office. The Clifford
J. Rogers, the world's first container ship, left Vancouver
with her first shipment, bound for the Yukon.
Says a web site that looks at the history of the
WP&YR: “The first containers designed and built by the
White Pass wouldn't meet today's standards. In fact the White Pass
‘test container—the first one built—had ‘bugs.’
The doors became wedged against each other, and at the end of its
first test trip it had to be opened with a cutting torch.”
See this
site.
Vancouver-based West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. began
operations with the purchase by three brothers—Henry, William
and Samuel Ketcham—of a small planer mill in Quesnel, B.C.
Today, the company owns 19 sawmills, three plywood plants, two veneer
plants, four pulp mills, two MDF plants and has approximately 7,500
employees. It logs mainly in Alberta and BC, but also has US logging
operations in Louisiana and Arkansas. The company planted its 300
millionth tree in 2000. They have an excellent web site at www.westfraser.com,
featuring an illustrated company timeline.
Quilchena Golf Course was obliterated for construction
of Prince of Wales High School and housing.
Stan Leonard, 40, BC’s greatest golfer, belatedly
joined the PGA tour full time. Born February 2, 1915, by the late
1920s Leonard was caddying at Shaughnessy Heights for 50 cents.
(This was before the 14-club limit when at least 20 clubs was not
uncommon.) By 1932, at age 17, Leonard was B.C. Amateur champion.
He would win a total of 44 tournaments during his career.
Vienna-born forest products executive John Prentice,
who had a deep passion for chess, became president of the Chess
Federation of Canada. He would hold the post to 1971, but continue
his involvement with the game into the 1980s. Prentice’s financial
support and organizational ability led him to be called Canada’s
Mr. Chess. He died in 1987.
Video and performance artist Paul Wong was born.
Journalist and author Rick Ouston was born. See this
site.
Award-winning humorist, poet, columnist and CBC radio
host Bill Richardson was born in Winnipeg. See this
site.
With the inclusion of Richmond, the Fraser Valley
Regional Library district covered an area of 4,000 square miles,
extending from Richmond to Hope, from Port Coquitlam to Agassiz,
and from the international border to the mountains north of the
Fraser River.
Vancouver’s G.F. Strong was named president
of the American College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Bill Rea, who had started Radio CKNW in 1944, and
moved to California for health reasons in 1954, sold the station
to accountant Frank Griffiths.
Judge Sherwood Lett became Chief Justice of BC. He
would hold the post until his death in 1964. For a good biography
see this
site.
Lawyer Leon Johnson Ladner became a UBC senator.
See this
site.
Stonemason Jimmy Cunningham, aged about 77, “retired.”
He had been working on the construction of the Stanley Park seawall
since 1917, eventually became supervisor of the work. After his
retirement he continued to come down to the wall to keep an eye
on things. He died September 29, 1963. His ashes are secreted in
an unmarked location within the wall.
Druggist George Cunningham was elected as a Vancouver
alderman. He had the most votes of any candidate. He served to 1957.
Samuel Patrick Cromie, 37, became vice president/assistant
publisher of Sun Publishing.
Medicine Hat-born B.C. Binning, 46, in BC since 1913,
co-founded UBC’s fine arts department. He would head the department
to 1968.
Baltimore-born Alvin Balkind, 34, who had come to
Vancouver in 1954, founded the New Design Gallery. It became a centre
for the avant-garde.
Calgary-born Hy Aisenstat and his wife Barbara, with
the help of a $3,000 loan, opened a restaurant called Hy’s
Steak House in Calgary. He would move to Vancouver in 1960 and launch
a small restaurant empire.
A story excerpted from Top Dog!, the history
of Radio CKNW, written by Chuck Davis and published by Canada Wide
Magazines in 1994:
For a textbook example of how to win over a reluctant
client, look at Mel Cooper's 1955 pursuit of Weston Bakeries. Through
his contacts in the food industry, Mel learned Weston was soon to
introduce a new product onto grocery shelves in western Canada:
Sunbeam Bread. It was an American innovation, and had been franchised
to many bakeries south of the border. It was still unknown in Canada.
“'We were on the outside looking in with the
Weston people,' Mel said. 'I couldn't even get my calls to Jim Johnston
answered. He was the key man. I went down to Seattle, where the
Hanson Bread people had a Sunbeam franchise. I saw the drawing of
the Miss Sunbeam girl on the package, and that gave me the idea.
I came back to Vancouver, had an outfit made identical to the one
on the package, the frilly little blue dress, then I hired a little
girl and drove her to Weston Bakeries at Kingsway and Broadway.
“'Now, remember, only Jim Johnston and his sales
manager knew anything about the upcoming launch of Sunbeam Bread
into this market. I sent the little girl up to his office, and I
waited in my car outside. The girl is carrying a little package.
The receptionist says, “Well, who do we have here?” The
girl says, “My name is Little Miss Sunbeam, and I'm here to
see Mr. Johnston.” The receptionist bounces up and into Johnston's
office. “There's someone out here you just have to see.”
Johnston comes out, sees the little girl, and he's instantly charmed.
He takes her into his office and she hands him the pretty little
package.
“'Inside it is a letter from me: “Dear
Mr. Johnston, my name is Mel Cooper, and I represent CKNW. We think
we can sell a lot of bread for you in this market, etc., etc. I'm
parked out on Broadway hoping to see you.'”
“'Well, he came down, invited me in, and we
got that account'.”
1955 Dodge Royal Lancer
Continued.....
[1757
- 1884] [1885 - 1891] [1892
- 1899]
[1900 - 1905] [1906
- 1908] [1909] [1910]
[1911] [1912]
[1913] [1914]
[1915] [1916]
[1917] [1918]
[1919] [1920]
[1921] [1922]
[1923] [1924]
[1925] [1926]
[1927] [1928]
[1929] [1930]
[1931] [1932]
[1933] [1934]
[1935] [1936]
[1937] [1938]
[1939] [1940]
[1941] [1942]
[1943] [1944]
[1945] [1946]
[1947] [1948]
[1949] [1950]
[1951] [1952]
[1953] [1954]
[1955] [1956] [1957]
[1958]
[1959] [1960]
[1961] [1962]
[1963] [1964]
[1965]
[1966] [1967]
[1968]
[1969] [1970]
[1971] [1972]
[1973] [1974]
[1975] [1976]
[1977] [1978]
[1979] [1980]
[1981] [1982]
[1983] [1984]
[1985] [1986]
[1987] [1988]
[1989] [1990]
[1991] [1992]
[1993] [1994]
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