A Year in Five Minutes: Vancouver 1934

Main Event: Gerry McGeer elected

1934 saw a new mayor who would leave his mark in the history books, the birth of the Malkin Bowl and big-name celebrities descend on the city. Plus racial tensions explode in Chinatown.

By Chuck Davis, The History of Vancouver
Photos courtesy of Vancouver Archives

On December 13, 1934 Gerald Grattan “Gerry” McGeer, 46, was swept into the mayoralty with the largest lead in Vancouver history: 25,000 votes out of 44,000 cast. He defeated L.D. Taylor, the most elected mayor in the city’s history. The McGeer victory put an end to Taylor’s political career. McGeer wasted no time getting into action: In the first week of his term he confiscated 1,000 slot machines in the city. He started a push for a new city hall, and insisted it go away out at West 12th and Cambie, when the sentiment (especially within the business community) was to keep it downtown. TIME Magazine, in likely its first-ever reference to a mayor of Vancouver, called McGeer “bumptious.” He still looms large in the city’s past: McGeer has more index entries in books on Vancouver’s history than anyone else. Read Mayor Gerry: the remarkable Gerald Grattan McGeer, by David Ricardo Williams.

First US airline arrival

The first United Airlines flight arrived July 1, 1934 at the Vancouver Airport. The move brought Vancouver air links with most of the continent and introduced the first modern airliner, the all-metal Boeing 247, capable of speeds up to 180 miles an hour.

Start on Bowl

The first sod for the construction of the Bowl in Stanley Park was turned May 21 by former mayor and wholesale food merchant William H. Malkin. The bowl was a gift to the city from as a memorial to his late wife Marion, who had died in 1933. “It replaced an old circular bandstand which stood on the very same spot,” Malkin recalled in a 1952 interview. “So many people were wondering why we had a village-style bandstand in a beautiful, big-city park that I decided something must be done about it.” The “something” was a donation of $8,000, plenty of money in those Depression days. The shell of the structure is patterned after the famous Hollywood Bowl. The original stage was 16.5 metres (54 feet) wide.

The first performance of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra would be held in Malkin Bowl this year. The performance was to celebrate the official opening of the bowl. In later years Theatre Under The Stars (TUTS) would make the Bowl its home. A group called the Home Gas Orchestra played often there.

The Great Profile visits

On July 11 actor John Barrymore, the “Great Profile,” visited Vancouver with his family. The Vancouver Sun sent columnist Bob Bouchette to interview one of the superstars of his day, and Bouchette found him aboard his yacht Infanta. (It had a crew of 12.) With the 52-year-old Barrymore was his wife Dolores, 30, and their children, Dolores Ethel, three, and 13-month old John Blythe Barrymore.

Barrymore told Bouchette the family was heading for Alaska in search of trout and salmon. Bouchette chatted with Barrymore’s wife, Dolores Costello, also a famous performer (six movies in 1929 alone). Dolores was holding her son, little John Blythe Barrymore, who in 1975 would have a daughter named Drew.

Baseball greats

If you were a rabid baseball fan waiting at the CPR station in Vancouver October 18, 1934 you might have had trouble breathing. Stepping down from the train that day were Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, Charlie Gehringer, Heinie Manush, Lefty O’Doul, manager Connie Mack and more than a dozen other superstars of the game. They’d come to play an exhibition game at Athletic Park, which stood at West 6th and Hemlock.

The Babe’s team was called “Babe Ruth’s All Americans,” and they would play the “American League All-Stars.” (Off-season barnstorming like this of squads made up of players from various teams was eventually stopped.)

Three thousand fans showed up the next day in pelting rain that lasted the whole game, with the field ankle-deep in mud, but the players—the Babe included—stayed, and so did the crowd. Said Lefty O’Doul in the dugout, “Say, this is some baseball town, isn’t it? Back in Portland there weren’t five hundred out and on a bright and sunny day.”

Ruth, who had hit 60 home runs for the Yankees a couple of years earlier, told the Sun’s Hal Straight that nobody would ever hit 60 again.

Chinatown riot

On January 1, 1934 there was a riot in Vancouver’s Chinatown as “more than 1,000 Orientals and white men” battled savagely in the unit and 100 blocks East Pender. Police reserves fought for more than an hour to disperse the mobs before the Fire Department was called to assist with high-pressure hoses. Cause of the riot was apparently an altercation between a Chinese taxi driver and his Occidental passenger. The Chinese allegedly struck the white man on the head with a hammer.

Foncie’s Fotos

A 20-year-old fellow named Foncie Pulice (the family pronounces it like the word “police”) set up a camera on the sidewalk on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver and began taking pictures of passersby. Pulice wasn’t the only one doing this at the time. Sidewalk photographers were taking candid shots of individuals, couples and family and other groups walking by in many major Canadian cities. They’d hand them a numbered ticket with an invitation to drop by their shop later to buy a copy of the picture. What would make Pulice unique in the trade is the length of time he kept at it: 45 years. And for the last 33 years of his career he used the same camera: his Electric-Photo camera—now preserved at the Vancouver Museum—was as familiar a local landmark as the Marine Building.

He took pictures on Granville Street, at the Pacific National Exhibition, in Stanley Park, elsewhere . . . millions of pictures. It’s possible that Foncie Pulice photographed more people than anybody else in the world.

“When I started back in 1934,” Foncie recalled in a Nov. 21, 1979 interview in the Province, “there were six companies in Vancouver, but when we really started to go was during the war. The public couldn’t get film, you see, so the street photographers were all they had. Servicemen would come home on leave, they’d have pictures taken. Families would get together, we’d take their picture. At one time, I was taking 4,000 to 5,000 pictures every day.”

Jack Short

Jack Short, 25, began his astonishing run of broadcasting race results over CJOR this year. (He had started in 1933 on another station.) “Too tall and too lanky” to succeed as a jockey, he called nearly 50,000 races at Exhibition Park, broadcast live for CJOR radio. He invariably signed off his broadcasts with the famous catch phrase, “Adiós amigos!” Jack wrapped it up in 1976.

Fragments

On January 5 the Vancouver Library Board accepted city council financial help to reopen the Library’s reading room, closed for most of 1933 from lack of funds.

Prime Minister R.B. Bennett spoke to the Vancouver Board of Trade’s 47th anniversary dinner at the Hotel Vancouver on January 29. Among his words, “Canada is a world example of successful weathering of this depression.” Yeah, right.

Almost 4,000 passengers were ferried from the city to the Ambleside ferry dock on a single day in January, 1934. Their destination: the trailhead on Hollyburn Mountain, popular with skiers and hikers.

The Vienna Choir Boys performed in Vancouver February 1, 1934. They will appear again in 1935 presented by New York impresario Sol Hurok.

On March 24 “Jack” Drainie (more well known later as John) appeared in a play produced by the Vancouver Little Theatre Assn. It’s Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen. J.V. Clyne played Sir Walter Raleigh.

On March 27 the Bessborough Armoury (built earlier) was formally opened by the man it was named for, Governor-General, the Earl of Bessborough.

On May 13, 1934 Acting Premier A. Wells Gray cut the ribbon on a 25-bed children’s hospital, which had opened in 1933 at 250 West 59th Avenue. The official opening ceremony had been delayed for months by a scarlet fever outbreak.

Not local, but irresistible: on May 28 the Dionne quintuplets were born in Callender, Ontario. (Would that make Mme. Dionne “quintamum”?)

May was an eventful month for Vancouver boxer Jimmy McLarnin. He had won the world welterweight championship May 29, 1933, kayoing Young Corbett, lost it to Barney Ross in May of ’34. He regained it in September, would lose it again in May, 1935.

The Fraser Valley Union Library District—the first regional library in North America—was established in June 1934 with headquarters in Abbotsford. The per capita tax rate to finance the system was set at 35 cents annually. The financial hardship for the young system was offset by an agreement among the participating communities to provide rent-free space. (In 1950 the rate was raised to 40 cents.)

On July 13 Coquitlam councillor Thomas Douglas was shot dead at his North Road gas station. Because he was a socialist—he had run provincially for the United Front, a Socialist party—some thought the murder had political overtones.

Con Jones Park was destroyed by a night fire July 29. The park, built in 1912 by Con Jones, was a wooden structure completely surrounding the field of play, bounded by Renfrew, Oxford, Kaslo and Cambridge Streets, across from the PNE grounds, and used for field lacrosse and soccer. It was rebuilt quickly.

September 1934 saw the first radio broadcasts of local lacrosse games.

R.H. Pooley, a Conservative MLA, made the Province’s front page November 17, 1934 with a charge that “professors at the University of British Columbia are teaching communism to our boys and girls . . . Those same professors are flourishing under the capitalist system. They are paid high salaries, but ask them to take a 10 per cent cut and they are the first to kick.” UBC president Leonard Klinck said he didn’t take Pooley very seriously. “Communism is dealt with, but it is never taught in the sense that Mr. Pooley means. After all, we can recognize the existence of a thing without preaching it.”

A newspaper report on December 8, 1934 said that negotiations were under way for a “central heating plant” for the downtown district and West End to be placed at “the north end of the Cambie Street bridge.” We assumed that referred to today’s Central Heat Distribution, at 720 Beatty, with a heating plant serving the downtown. But no, CHD didn’t start until 1966, and knew nothing of this earlier scheme! The chief sponsor of the 1934 project, H.A. Flood, told council “that progress is rapidly being made on the scheme, and he expects to announce soon when work will be started.”

Also in 1934

The PNE gave away a home as part of the first Prize Home Lottery. This was the first time such a significant prize had ever been awarded. The prize was valued at more than $5,000 including home, east Vancouver lot and furnishings (from Eaton’s).

Francis William Caulfeild died in London, England, in his 90th year. In 1899 he had bought the land between Cypress Creek and Point Atkinson—an area called Skunk Cove. He renamed it Caulfeild (thanks!) and began to lay out a village. He wasn’t fond of the local custom in which straight streets and avenues intersect at right angles, so he laid out a village of the English type with winding lanes following the natural contours of the wooded slopes. (A curiosity: Caulfeild never lived in B.C., although he visited often, making his last trip in 1926. And that spelling of his name is correct.) There is a very good, short bio by Philip Collings here.

Howard Rodgers began to operate a water taxi and rescue boat from Horseshoe Bay, running mercy missions for the Britannia Mines.

Amsterdam-born Dorothy Gretchen Steeves, 39, one of the founders of the CCF, was elected this year as MLA for North Vancouver, one of seven original CCF members in B.C. She would hold the seat for 11 years.

Convicts in the B.C. Penitentiary refused to work unless given wages, then went on a rampage destroying prison property. It was the first disturbance of any note at the prison. It would not be the last.

The Jewish Congress was founded in Vancouver.

The Kiwassa Club of Vancouver was formed by 100 wives of members of the Kiwanis Club of Vancouver.

Deaf and blind Charlie Crane enrolled as a special student at UBC. He proved outstanding in athletics, particularly in wrestling.

Radio station CRCV appeared, headquartered on Station Street off Main. It had been CNRV, the CNR station, but now it was run by a new entity called the Canadian Radio Commission, which in 1936 would change yet again to the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

South Italy-born Joe Philliponi (born Filippone), 21, future nightclub owner, who had come to Vancouver in the early 1930s, started Eagle-Time Delivery Systems.

Fraserview Golf Course opened.

Bobby Jones, considered along with Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods one of the century’s best golf players, visited Vancouver and played at Shaughnessy Heights Golf Club.

June Roper, a teacher from Rosebud, Texas, settled in Vancouver after a distinguished career as a dancer in Europe. She will become an extraordinarily influential dancing teacher here.

Peter Stursberg began his journalism career at the Victoria Daily Times.

Perth, Australia-born Dorothy Somerset, who had moved to Vancouver in 1921, began as a director with the University Players’ Club. She would be a prominent theatre figure here for more than 50 years.

Manitoba-born Ira Dilworth, scholar and broadcaster, became a popular associate professor of English at UBC this year. Later, he will become an influential CBC figure.

Buckinghamshire, England-born Charles Edward Findlater, who had come to Vancouver in 1918 to teach voice and piano, founded the Elgar Choir.

Helen Gregory MacGill, the first woman to be a judge in this province, was named to the B.C. board of industrial relations.

Departures

On July 5, 1934 Frank (Francis) E. Harrison, former postmaster, died in Vancouver. He was born February 1, 1861 in Stratford, Ontario. In 1889 he came to B.C. and opened the Mainland’s first RMS (Railway Mail Service) office. When the Vancouver Post Office was placed on a city basis in 1895 he was assistant postmaster under Jonathan Miller. He succeeded R.G. Macpherson as postmaster January 10, 1920 and retired in 1928.

Joseph Moore Steves, the second son of William Herbert Steves, who founded Steveston, died this year. Joseph Steves developed B.C.’s largest Holstein herd, supplying milk for Vancouver until the cattle were sold during the Depression.

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Chuck Davis is a Vancouver writer who has written, co-written, or edited 15 books. Most of them are on local history, and he describes his next book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, as the capstone of his career.