Some odd stuff has happened in Vancouver's past. Here's a sampling (click to view):

· 1792 to 1899
· 1900 to 1922
· 1923 to 1930
· 1931 to 1935
· 1936 to 1940
· 1941 to 1946
· 1947 to 1954
· 1955 to 1960
· 1961 to 1965

From 1941 to 1946

For more details on these items see the Chronology for the year cited.

• In 1941 there was a semi-professional football team in Vancouver called the Vancouver Grizzlies!
• On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, the electric flame at the Stanley Park war memorial commemorating the Japanese-Canadian contribution during World War I was switched off. It would not be switched on again until 1985.
• In Metropolitan Vancouver in 1941 four out of five homes did not have all of the following: a car, a telephone, a radio and a vacuum cleaner.
• On August 9, 1942 A.E. McRae’s Hycroft mansion in Shaughnessy, built at a cost of $109,000 in 1909, was sold by the McRaes to a grateful federal government for $1. It was used as a military hospital.
• On November 6, 1942 one of the lions (carved in 1908 by John Bruce) in front of the provincial courthouse (now our Art Gallery), the lion on the west side, was damaged by a bomb. The culprit was never caught.
• Some of the stained glass windows at St. John's Shaughnessy Anglican Church at Nanton and Granville Streets in Vancouver are made from shattered fragments of 11th century stained glass from England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral had been bombed during the Second World War.
• Vancouver doctor Masajiro Miyazaki practiced medicine in the city until 1942. Then the Japan-born doctor was interned in the Bridge River-Lillooet area. In 1945 the town of Lillooet petitioned for his release to replace its deceased doctor.
• In 1942 Saba's, the largest retail house in Western Canada specializing in silks, experienced a riot when 500 women stampeded the store to buy 300 pairs of nylon stockings (no one was hurt).
• On August 25, 1943 at rededication ceremonies in Stanley Park, the official party was driven by Frank Plant, who had driven Lord and Lady Stanley and Mayor and Mrs. Oppenheimer to the original dedication 55 years earlier! The 1889 ceremony was re-created at the same spot.
• From the September 23, 1943 Province: “When Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Valleau purchased a home on Burte Street in Burnaby they proceeded to build a home. That was last February. Just the other day when Mr. J. H. Treaves purchased a lot, he discovered he owned the Valleau home. Arrangements for the transfer are being completed, and Mr. and Mrs. Valleau will soon have title to their home. They had mistakenly built their home on the adjoining piece of property.”
• In 1943 Kitsilano Beach was used for rehearsing commando beach assaults.
• The clubhouse of the Southlands Riding Club, incorporated in 1943, was once an abandoned fisherman's net storage hut on Deering Island. The hut was dismantled and carried piece by piece, by members on horseback, to its present site.
• On April 23, 1944 Jack Benny did his famous radio show from Vancouver. He brought his regular cast up from New York: Mary Livingstone, Phil Harris, Rochester, Dennis Day and announcer Don Wilson. What made the show particularly notable was that Mary Livingstone (real name Sadie Marks) had grown up in Vancouver.
• On April 6, 1945 the town of Coevorden, the Dutch city from which Capt. George Vancouver's family derived its name, was liberated from Nazi occupation. In a happy coincidence, April 6 is the City of Vancouver's birthday!
• On July 14th, 1945 the Province ran a story about a young blind man named Ivan Knopski who was building his own house at the corner of Main Street and East 29th Avenue. “His neighbors, as they watched him building, didn’t believe he was blind. They were sure he was boasting, that he had some sight left. But when they heard his hammer going on into the night till 11 and 12 and no lanterns around, then they knew he must be telling the truth.” [The house is no longer there.]
• On November 6, 1945 Vancouver city council cancelled an order that had established separate swimming days at Crystal Pool for non-white people. The pool, the Province reported, “is now open to everyone, all the time, regardless of race, creed, or colour.”
• Mayor L.D. Taylor, who died in 1946, was once briefly married to two women at the same time. [See the Daniel Francis book, L.D. Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver for details.]
• On July 13, 1946 Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis, Canada’s new Governor General, became the only white man in the history of the Pacific coast to become, with full tribal rites, a native chief. While he was here, Alexander received a Kwakiutl thunderbird headdress and ceremonial blanket, and became Chief Nakupunkim.
• When the parking meter came to Vancouver in 1946 the fee was 5 cents for one hour’s parking.

1946 to 1954 »