Characters

 When I was growing up, characters abounded. People with their own individual quirky personalities or physical features and they didn't care what other people thought. We lived in a café/fish and chip shop at one time and some of the characters strolled in the door. The café had three booths along one wall, an L shaped counter with six or eight stools covered in red plastic. If you got to the end of the short side of the L, there was a coke machine that held the pop bottles hanging by their necks in a bath of chilled water. The lid lifted up and you had to slide the bottle out, wipe it dry on the towel and pop the lid on the opener on the side of the cooler. The bottle cap fell into an enclosed tray. In front of the large front window was room for a pin ball machine.

One of the characters was Albert, always in work clothes and a three day beard before that became fashionable. Albert would lean on the lunch counter with both elbows over his coffee in a thick china mug and complain how he is unable to work because of his damaged elbow. Who knew? Also a frequent customer was Mr. Lee, I'm sorry I don't remember his first name. He would stop in at least once a week, flogging vegetables and greens from the back of his old truck. This was in the mid 1950s but Mr. Lee drove a model T Ford pickup, with canvas curtains on the back roof, that could be rolled up and held up with leather buckle straps. He and Albert would pass the time of day at the counter.

New Westminster, the Royal City, (formerly the capitol of the colony) was where we would go to town. Downtown, along the Fraser River, sported two movie theatres (the Columbia and the Paramount), Murchies Tea and Coffee, Bata Shoes, Kresges, Woolworths and Army and Navy department stores. Uptown at 6th Avenue and 6th Street was the brand new Woodward's store. Downtown, the characters were like from a cartoon. A man whispered to me from an alley, "Psst, hey kid. Do you want to buy a watch?" He opened his overcoat and had watches pinned in neat rows on both sides. This wasn't so long after WW2 and you could still see down and out veterans without legs moving about on four wheeled mover's dollies. Wheelchairs were still hard to come by. Prospectors and fishermen still bought their goods on Front Street where you could also find Jones Tent and Awning, who had made bedrolls for prospectors since the big rush of 1898.

New Westminster also had the docks for deep sea merchantmen. This is prior to containerized freight and ships were loaded and unloaded by a team of stevedores. At a minimum there were two men each on a ship's deck crane, two men hooking and unhooking on the dock with two or more in the hold. Prior to forklift trucks, all the freight had to be moved into and out of the long freight sheds by hand carts. We boys were still able to wander along the docks and talk to sailors and dock workers, who looked like they had stepped out of a Herman cartoon by Jim Unger - shoes a couple of sizes too big, long arms and big hands, droopy pants (before they became fashionable), and often a nose that seemed too large for the face.

New West was the place to be for a teenage boy. At the end of the deep sea wharves was the fishermen's docks where CKNW radio station sponsored the annual herring sale. Just bring your own pails. The Samson was also moored there. There have been five or six Samsons, all stern wheelers with an A frame on the bow for picking up deadheads and snags that were dangerous to shipping. I also watched a man rig a new mast into the sailboat he had built. Further down the Fraser River was White Pine sawmill, Scott Paper and then the marine ways and shops for the Forestry Vessels that used to go up the coast.