#vancouversun

Michael Kluckner has published his latest illustrated book, appropriately named Surviving Vancouver. As usual, it is a must read!

https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-surviving-vancouver-in-more-ways-than-one

On the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, the Vancouver Sun used some of the WWII front pages from Robert’s book in their tribute to the past. John Mackie wrote the lead story on B2 titled “They way we were”, and painted a picture of Vancouver 50 years prior. Here are a few excerpts:

Vancouver was a far different city in 1945.

For starters, it was a lot smaller. The population of the city of Vancouver was 316,496. There were 28,000 people on the North Shore, 35,000 in Burnaby, and 25,000 in New Westminster. Richmond had a mere 9,000 residents, and there were more chickens than people in Surrey.

On the surface, it was a very strait-laced city. Stores closed for a half-day on Wednesday, and on Sunday, the city virtually shut down -- you couldn't even go to a movie or sports event because the Lord's Day Alliance Act prevented anyone from charging admission on the Sabbath.

''Protestant Christians were in firm control of Canada at that time,'' laughs Robert Reid, who has published a collection of war-time newspapers in The Front Page History of World War II...

The newspapers referred to Germans as Huns, the Japanese as Japs and the Russians as Reds. Divorces were front page news. Telephones had six numbers...

The big employer during the war was the shipyard industry, which had about 25,000 workers and turned out about two-thirds of Canada's freighters from 1939 to 1945...

The price of houses ranged from $1,000 for a two-room cottage at 3112 East 1st to $3,700 for a six-room house (and a chicken shed) on 1.6 hectares near New Westminster and $6,500 for an eight-room waterfront home at Locarno Beach.

Here you can see a pair of high resolution pages from microfilm, recently digitized by newspapers.com. Shown above is The Vancouver Sun from August 15, 1945, also known as V-J Day. From the above caption, there was not one but THREE EXTRA editions published in two hours following the announcement the night before.

Much of the previous day’s EXTRA edition was republished on V-J Day in this regular edition paper, but the bold PEACE headline was subsequently replaced, and virtually lost entirely. The only memory of that headline lies in the middle of page 12, with a photographer’s snapshot of the EXTRA edition in the hands of ‘an old-timer’.

PEACE, WWII EXTRA edition, from Robert Reid’s collection. This paper was a late edition of the August 14, 1945 Vancouver Sun. The next day, a special edition paper used much of the previous day’s layout, but that long awaited headline nearly disappeared entirely. I’ll show you what survives on the microfilm version tomorrow.

Museums and archives generally don’t like taking on newspapers, as they are perpetually degrading, and their preservation often seems futile. As a result, many rare and obscure papers have been / and are continually lost to the ravages of time.

These EXTRA editions are a prime example of that. The EXTRA editions quite often were never microfilmed, as these copies weren’t distributed by subscription ~ you had to hit the streets to get your hands on one. Even on the rare occasion when they were microfilmed, the unique colours of the paper or the bold headline colours would be lost forever. As scanning technology improves, it becomes more and more feasible to capture the existing quality of the original with outstanding results.

The newspapers I will feature here have been scanned or photographed a number of different ways. I’ve used flatcopy digital photography, flatbed scanning, and more recently large format CCD scanning. The WWI paper posted previously appears to be flatcopy digital photography [done by the Museum of Vancouver]; the WWII paper was just done with a large format CCD scanner.