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Excerpt - After World War I
Excerpt from Port Coquitlam: Where Rails Meet Rivers
By Chuck Davis
The year after the war ended, PoCo held a civic election that was notable for a couple of reasons: it brought in as mayor the very popular Charlie Davies, who had been an alderman for twenty years, and it returned to council for a second term Rosina Morrill, only the second woman to win a seat, and the only woman on the ‘46 council. (Jane Kilmer didn’t run that year.) Rosina’s husband Bill had died, and she had to find work to provide for her four kids. She became a nurse’s aide at Essondale…but with not enough income to afford a car, she had to hitchhike to work! (One wonders how many city councils in Canada had members who hitchhiked to work.) Eventually the hospital started a bus service for its employees, but it was tough to juggle work, raise a family and sit on council.
Young George Laking, later to become a Port Coquitlam alderman and mayor, had his own transportation woes at the time. He didn’t have a car, and he was courting Joycelyn Huth, an Essondale nurse-in-training who lived in residence at the hospital. George had to take a cab out to the hospital every time he wanted to see her, and the fare was 50 cents, no small amount back then. (George and Jocelyn were married in 1949.) As a fifteen-year-old, George had started working for the Canadian Western Lumber Company in 1943, doing odd jobs at first. “Within six months I was sawing shingles. Then they shut down the shingle mill, and I went to plywood for four or five years.
“They had as many as 2,200 people working at that mill, but when Crown Zellerbach bought them out in ‘53 they were down to about 200. I got hurt in 1951. I was sawing shingles and the equipment broke. I didn’t want the saw to fall on my feet, so I grabbed it, wrecked my back. I was off for one year and nine months. Three months I was lying on a Foster bed, didn’t move, couldn’t wash myself. The neurosurgeon, he tells me he didn’t think my right leg would ever work. I said, ‘You just leave me alone. I’ll make it work’.” And George did. His recovery included going to what was then the Workmen’s Compensation Board in Vancouver. He drove in for therapy every day for five months. “The WCB doc said he didn’t think I should go back to work. I told him, ‘I’ll go nuts if I don’t’.” He went back. When George retired from Canadian Western on April 30, 1991, he had been there “forty years, eleven months exactly.” To the hard-working and serious Port Coquitlam of the 1940s, Karl and Clara “Babe” Jacobs brought a touch of glamour and excitement. They had come to town in the 1930s and owned several rustic cabins situated near the Coquitlam River. It was said that Mexican-born Clara Jacobs had been a Hollywood actress, and it appeared she was still playing the role. “Heads would turn…when they saw Clara Jacobs, in long scarf and dark glasses, driving her beautiful old car, complete with rumble seat,” wrote a town historian in Port Coquitlam: City of Rivers and Mountains. Karl’s brother was rumoured to be a movie director, and there was also talk that Karl had been a Hollywood stuntman…and one of the first referees in the National Hockey League! (A researcher aches to know how Karl and Clara met.) Their collection of cabins, formally Steelhead Ranch, was informally known as “Hollywood Hideout,” and local legend says that many stars of the silver screen stayed there from time to time, including Errol Flynn. Sadly, in 1961 this scenic vacation retreat was washed out when the Coquitlam River flooded. The Internet Movie Data Base, which has details on every movie ever made and all the people who worked on them, shows no Clara or Babe Jacobs in its vast data bank (and no chronologically correct Karl Jacobs), but perhaps she’s listed there under her maiden name or a screen name. Now and again a fact in a city’s history pops up that gives a delightfully clear picture of what it was like in earlier days. Nancy Ogilvie, a member of the Port Coquitlam Heritage and Cultural Society and a treasure trove of information for this book (and who, incidentally, was the 1942 May Queen), recalls that her family, armed with the proper licences, occasionally made trips to “the flats,” now the Broadway industrial area, to shoot pheasants for Sunday dinner. “The birds were in abundance in those days. We wore big hipped wading boots, and I remember we’d get hung up sometimes on the barbed wire fence.” Her dad raised and trained hunting dogs, including golden and water spaniels, Labrador golden retrievers, Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Irish setters and pointers. They’d be put to work in the hunt, during which young Nancy—carefully taught by her father—would get some shooting in herself.
“We had 1,500 people here in 1942,” Nancy says. “It was like a big family, everyone knew everyone else.” She recalls swimming with friends in the “beautiful unpolluted waters of the Coquitlam River, where deep holes formed as the river made its way to the Fraser and the sea. It is true that you could actually walk across the fish in the river bed at spawning time.” Long-time PoCo resident Don Gillespie recalls fish swimming in ditches alongside some city streets all the way up to Prairie Road.
By Chuck Davis
The year after the war ended, PoCo held a civic election that was notable for a couple of reasons: it brought in as mayor the very popular Charlie Davies, who had been an alderman for twenty years, and it returned to council for a second term Rosina Morrill, only the second woman to win a seat, and the only woman on the ‘46 council. (Jane Kilmer didn’t run that year.) Rosina’s husband Bill had died, and she had to find work to provide for her four kids. She became a nurse’s aide at Essondale…but with not enough income to afford a car, she had to hitchhike to work! (One wonders how many city councils in Canada had members who hitchhiked to work.) Eventually the hospital started a bus service for its employees, but it was tough to juggle work, raise a family and sit on council.
Young George Laking, later to become a Port Coquitlam alderman and mayor, had his own transportation woes at the time. He didn’t have a car, and he was courting Joycelyn Huth, an Essondale nurse-in-training who lived in residence at the hospital. George had to take a cab out to the hospital every time he wanted to see her, and the fare was 50 cents, no small amount back then. (George and Jocelyn were married in 1949.) As a fifteen-year-old, George had started working for the Canadian Western Lumber Company in 1943, doing odd jobs at first. “Within six months I was sawing shingles. Then they shut down the shingle mill, and I went to plywood for four or five years.
“They had as many as 2,200 people working at that mill, but when Crown Zellerbach bought them out in ‘53 they were down to about 200. I got hurt in 1951. I was sawing shingles and the equipment broke. I didn’t want the saw to fall on my feet, so I grabbed it, wrecked my back. I was off for one year and nine months. Three months I was lying on a Foster bed, didn’t move, couldn’t wash myself. The neurosurgeon, he tells me he didn’t think my right leg would ever work. I said, ‘You just leave me alone. I’ll make it work’.” And George did. His recovery included going to what was then the Workmen’s Compensation Board in Vancouver. He drove in for therapy every day for five months. “The WCB doc said he didn’t think I should go back to work. I told him, ‘I’ll go nuts if I don’t’.” He went back. When George retired from Canadian Western on April 30, 1991, he had been there “forty years, eleven months exactly.” To the hard-working and serious Port Coquitlam of the 1940s, Karl and Clara “Babe” Jacobs brought a touch of glamour and excitement. They had come to town in the 1930s and owned several rustic cabins situated near the Coquitlam River. It was said that Mexican-born Clara Jacobs had been a Hollywood actress, and it appeared she was still playing the role. “Heads would turn…when they saw Clara Jacobs, in long scarf and dark glasses, driving her beautiful old car, complete with rumble seat,” wrote a town historian in Port Coquitlam: City of Rivers and Mountains. Karl’s brother was rumoured to be a movie director, and there was also talk that Karl had been a Hollywood stuntman…and one of the first referees in the National Hockey League! (A researcher aches to know how Karl and Clara met.) Their collection of cabins, formally Steelhead Ranch, was informally known as “Hollywood Hideout,” and local legend says that many stars of the silver screen stayed there from time to time, including Errol Flynn. Sadly, in 1961 this scenic vacation retreat was washed out when the Coquitlam River flooded. The Internet Movie Data Base, which has details on every movie ever made and all the people who worked on them, shows no Clara or Babe Jacobs in its vast data bank (and no chronologically correct Karl Jacobs), but perhaps she’s listed there under her maiden name or a screen name. Now and again a fact in a city’s history pops up that gives a delightfully clear picture of what it was like in earlier days. Nancy Ogilvie, a member of the Port Coquitlam Heritage and Cultural Society and a treasure trove of information for this book (and who, incidentally, was the 1942 May Queen), recalls that her family, armed with the proper licences, occasionally made trips to “the flats,” now the Broadway industrial area, to shoot pheasants for Sunday dinner. “The birds were in abundance in those days. We wore big hipped wading boots, and I remember we’d get hung up sometimes on the barbed wire fence.” Her dad raised and trained hunting dogs, including golden and water spaniels, Labrador golden retrievers, Chesapeake Bay retrievers, Irish setters and pointers. They’d be put to work in the hunt, during which young Nancy—carefully taught by her father—would get some shooting in herself.
“We had 1,500 people here in 1942,” Nancy says. “It was like a big family, everyone knew everyone else.” She recalls swimming with friends in the “beautiful unpolluted waters of the Coquitlam River, where deep holes formed as the river made its way to the Fraser and the sea. It is true that you could actually walk across the fish in the river bed at spawning time.” Long-time PoCo resident Don Gillespie recalls fish swimming in ditches alongside some city streets all the way up to Prairie Road.
