THE QUARANTINIAN

I once listed a few of the conversations with students and came across it years later. Some of them are kind of funny but often were a...

We landed back on the Coast in late November 1960 and spent Christmas with Joan’s parents Harry and Linda Fisher in Victoria. I had...

Graduating with an MD in 1958, interning at Vancouver General Hospital in 1958-59, and completing a Resident year at Shaughnessy Hospital...

Old age sneaks up on you. Who is old ? Not me. It’s that old guy next door wobbling down the hall on his walker. It’s the old lady...

“Look Woody. Anyone who would want to go fishing in January in the middle of a blizzard in an open boat has to be nuts. Besides I planned...

As a prairie kid I had never heard of English rugby until I moved to Victoria from Alberta in the fall of 1944 and attended Mount View...

In the spring of 1951 after my mediocre two years at Victoria College, at the urging of a couple of friends I joined a Provincial...

I returned to Bamfield in the 1990s as a tourist years after my commercial fishing. When the children were small, as a family we spent...

It was decided that Dick and Noreen would live in Bamfield which was close to the fishing grounds. It had a store and repair services...

In the decade or so that the Jean B was fished by brother Dick he targeted mainly salmon but when a tuna run developed after the war,...

Bamfield was still the centre of operations. Access was only by boat or the occasional plane. There was no road until, I think the mid...

The resettling of the family in Victoria BC in 1944 was more or less completed in the spring of 1945. Dad became thinner and more sickly....

I was an indifferent high school  student. Getting good marks was not tolerated by the guys and would label you as a “suck hole”. So...

My mother, father and I arrived in Victoria to 3493 Lovat Ave around Thanksgiving. The small bungalow was brand spanking new and sat on a...

From the time of my birth until I started school in grade one I was called “Junior” named after my dad, Alexander - as in Alex junior.

On any prairie farm the nerve centre is the farmhouse. On our Vauxhall farm this was certainly the case. It was a source of warmth and...

The Vauxhall farm was born in the early 1920s when my folks moved from the unirrigated Saskatchewan homestead to irrigated land seven...

The details of early days at Loverna, Saskatchewan are a bit sketchy for me. However there are several detailed descriptions by Alberta...

My mother Ola was born in Omemee, Ontario near Peterborough to George Mulligan and Effie Maude (nee Turner). George was said to have been...

My dad was a chain smoker. He rolled his own. One large green can of Ogden’s fine cut per week. He rarely had a cigarette out of his...

Early in the war the government in consultation with our Allies established the Commonwealth Air Training Program designed to train...

On September first Hitlers Germany invaded Poland, and Britain immediately gave Hitler an ultimatum which expired the same day and war...

We younger kids were very little affected and unaware of the events in Germany leading up to the outbreak of WWII . Maybe my parents knew bu

Another outhouse calamity happened when a small “wiener” pig who had the run of the yard decided to explore inside the outhouse.

Grade two close your scribblers and open your story books. Grade three close your books, open your scribblers and pay attention to the blac

The lived in a sod hut the first winter until the house was finished.

We kids all had farm duties. My first job at age four was gathering eggs. It took a fair amount of courage to retrieve a warm egg out from u

“I kept me ‘ead down, me mouth shut and I didn’t volunteer for nuthin”