Local author Heather Conn comes by her interest in streetcars honestly. She once worked as communications manager for B.C. Transit where she edited the company newsletter and embellished it with articles and images from the archives. Later, she wrote Vancouver's Trolley Buses, 1948 to 1998. When she's not riding the No. 25 bus in Vancouver, she lives in Roberts Creek. Why a book about transit? After all, it's not a glamorous topic. Who would be interested but a handful of streetcar buffs? Thankfully, Vancouver's Glory Years: Public Transit 1890 to 1915 is not just about the rolling stock. The authors, Conn and Henry Ewert, tie the rise of transit to the 25 year period of change in Vancouver's history, a period of "transit"ion, if you like. Just as the interurban rail lines linked the new communities of Gastown, Cedar Cottage and far away New Westminster, so the neighbourhoods grew and changed to become the tough, young city of Vancouver. The history of the lines that connected them has become the history of the pioneers. These stories are fleshed out wonderfully with many archive photos, some never before published, of a Vancouver that is beyond most of our living memories. We learn about such strange innovations as the hobble skirt cars - low riding streetcars designed so women would not strain indelicately to reach the platform while wearing the fashionable hobble skirts of 1913. Only in Vancouver, you say. The special streetcars never caught on elsewhere. We also read about the lives of the hard-working employees, the conductors and motormen. One long-serving motorman was also a part-time prospector but could not take the time from his long days in the driver's seat to work his claim on a gold mine in Kingcome Inlet. He lost his opportunity; 40 years later the mine made a fortune. Currently, Conn is writing a children's picture book and is a keen photographer with some of her pieces on show at the Gibsons Public Art Gallery.
Vancouver's Glory Years is available in hardcover from Whitecap Books for $45.
The selected works of Peter Trower, Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys, could also be called a foray into glory years. In this case, the book compiles poems written over much of the life of the Gibsons poet - from 1969 to 2004. Trower has earned a reputation for his logging poetry (he was a logger for 22 years) but this book presents other facets of his life - often more interesting than the numerous poems about chokers, fellers and spars. Here, we feel the tension of ship passengers crossing the Atlantic during wartime; we understand what it is to be a youth "when the kisses were still in the whiskey and Sally Singer peddled her hips along Granville Street." We accompany the poet to the workplace in one devastatingly powerful piece, "Industrial Poem," in which he watches a colleague wrapped around pulp mill machinery "in directions bones won't bend." We journey around Gibsons with Trower, suffer writers' block on Soames Hill and ponder an ancient logging camp at the Skookumchuck rapids. This is a strong, pithy book of poems that should appeal to both genders. No moon in June here. Yet, there is an element of gentleness and wistfulness that shows up in the work of his later years. "A Small Hum of Joy in the Heart," dedicated to Yvonne, has that quality. Haunted Hills & Hanging Valleys is available in paperback from Harbour Publishing for $18.95.
