There's been something flat about life around these parts, something missing. What it is, I finally figured out, is that Edith isn’t here anymore. Hurricane Edie, as her American family called her. Edith Iglauer Hamburger Daly White died in 2019 at the age of 101 and admittedly she’d been slowing down for a few years but she was the sun at the centre of our social scene for such a long time, it will take a while yet for the gap she left to grow over.
Some people can move into an area and live there for years without being noticed. Others you start hearing about the moment they arrive, and their legend just grows. I heard of Edith first around 1975 from Blind Bill Milligan who had met her in company of John Daly, a long-time bachelor with a reputation for talking too much. “Holy keee-rist!” Bill ranted. “Are my ears bleeding? I thought Daly talked, but he’s met his match. This woman can talk five words to his one!”
Pretty soon I was hearing about Edith everywhere I went. According to Bill, who was usually unreliable, she was a writer, and not just any writer, but a regular contributor to the high-hat New Yorker, which seemed unlikely, and even less likely, Bill claimed she and Daly had a thing going. Both turned out to be true. She had been recently divorced and was casting about for a new life when the magazine gave her an assignment to write about BC’s commercial salmon industry. An old friend put her onto John, who had been trolling for 40 years and didn’t mind talking about it. He took her out on his More Kelp for a few trips, then a few more, and what usually happens when you do that happened.
One day they turned up married. It was quite a culture shock for both of them. She’d been raised by well-off parents in a toney part of Cleveland, went to a toney women’s college and married into the exclusive New Yorker circle where she rubbed elbows with the great and famous. He had a lonely childhood often living with relatives and never found his niche until he went fishing. He loved that, and kept at it all his life. He died of a heart attack just four years after they married, but rather than move back to New York as everyone expected, Edith chose to continue living in Daly’s beach shack on the Sunshine Coast and stayed there for 50 years in all. She wrote three books during that time, including the classic Fishing with John.
It’s too bad the term “larger than life” is so overused, because it was made for Edith, though she barely topped the five-foot mark. She was one of those people who if she entered a crowded room, all talk would stop as people rushed over to her. I lived on the coast for 30 years before her but by the time she was here six months she knew more locals than me. And unlike in my case, they all liked her. She had a talent I don’t know the word for, but it was some kind of genius for socializing. She was at it night and day. As a journalist she was notorious for getting to elusive subjects like then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, causing competing scribes like Peter Gzowski to grouse about favouritism, but she was equally adept at getting Inuit trappers and ice road truckers to confide their inner hopes. She was completely colour and class blind. She would spend an hour talking to the garbage truck driver, making him late but feeling someone cared about his life story.
The real test of her egalitarianism was my father, a gnarly old logger in whom she purported to find previously unsuspected depths of character and who she lived with for her last 30 years. Dad made several road trips across the US with her and he said no matter what Podunk town they stopped in, she would know somebody there who would welcome them with open arms. Back on the coast, her little beach shack would be hopping with some kind of do every weekend and often on a few days in between.
When you walked in, you might find a mossy old hermit sitting at the table or a Supreme Court judge. On different occasions I met the artist Bill Reid, the architect Arthur Erickson and Romeo LeBlanc, the Governor General of Canada. I particularly remember her haranguing LeBlanc about her neighbour, The Seattle Yacht Club. The SYC had built massive new docks that blocked her sinking little wharf. With names like Gates and Boeing among their members the SYC thought they could laugh off the noisy little fishwife, and so did everyone else. They were wrong. After about five years of having their name blackened in every media outlet in North America, the SYC sent a piledriver up to pull out the offending pilings and docks. When Hurricane Edie got you in her crosshairs, the sooner you got out of the way the better, no matter how many billionaires you might have working the back channels.
Things are just not the same around here without her
