Coming to Vancouver

When I was a kid we lived near Chilliwack.  Vancouver was a long way away.  There was no freeway and no Port Mann Bridge. Trips to Vancouver took us through Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Aldergrove, and Langley.  We passed by Cloverdale and then over the Pattullo Bridge.  Then along Kingsway.  That’s why there are still a few motels along Kingsway.  That was where everyone had to go.  (Well, not those who lived on the north side of the Fraser.) At some point I remember Mum saying that her sister Helen had been in touch with an older sister living in Vancouver.  So we began to visit Aunt Mona and her husband Joe. I remember looking out the back window at their place and seeing what was like a valley among all the peaked houses.  I had never seen so many houses crowded together like that.
Later, after the freeway and the Port Mann bridge were built, we travelled into Vancouver to buy stock for our hardware store in Yarrow.  I remember Marshall Wells on Carrall St., just a block from Pender.  Dad told us that Raymond Burr’s father worked there.  And I remember Paramount Salvage.  My Uncle Jake had discovered this outlet while he ran his hardware store in Clearbrook.  If a truck load of children’s toys or canned goods had been shaken up in a traffic accident, they’d find their way to Paramount Salvage.  And bargain hunters like Dad and Uncle Jake could offer these deals to their equally frugal customers in Yarrow and Clearbrook. Our trips took us by Chinatown and Dad had the opportunity to buy Chinese language newspapers.  He would sit on his school bus as students boarded, pretending to read them.
In 1963, when I was about to turn 18, I started at UBC.  I could have taken Grade 13 at Chilliwack Senior Secondary, but I wanted to get away from conservative and narrow Chilliwack and I was drawn to UBC, which seemed to be a beacon of enlightenment.  My parents consented.  I’m not sure why I had to travel east on Broadway, but I did, on the trolley bus of the time.  I remember the China Creek bicycle racing track, where the Kind Edward campus of Vancouver City College is now.  https://www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org/place-that-matters/china-creek-cycle-track/. It had been built for the Empire Games of 1954.
And I remember a bus driver on one of these trips as his bus lurched and a passenger lurched with the bus and had to grab something to keep himself from falling.  “That’ll be an extra ten cents, sir, if you want to dance on the bus.”