Welcome to Lake Flashback. Reporter Lexi Bainas has been combing through old newspapers with the assistance of the Kaatza Station Museum and Archives so we can jog your memory, give you that nostalgic feeling, or just a chuckle, as we take a look at what was making headlines this week around Cowichan Lake in years gone by.
10 years ago:
“Hillcrest reunion group donates to memorial park” was the headline on the June 13, 2007 edition of the Lake Cowichan Gazette.
Editor Doug Marner told the story: “Cecil Ashley lives in Abbotsford now but he spent many years in the Cowichan Lake area when he worked for Hillcrest Lumber.
“He was one of 90 people who attended the seventh Hillcrest Reunion, held a couple of weeks ago in Mesachie Lake. Ashley, who worked 47 years in the forest industry, including seven for Hillcrest Lumber, was thrilled when he read the Lake Cowichan Gazette online and learned about the Forest Workers’ Memorial Park.
“‘I’d been trying to find something that we could make a donation to and when I read about the memorial park I knew it was the right thing. I put donation cans on the tables at the reunion and we raised $250.’
“Of that $100 will go to buy a memorial brick dedicated to the Hillcrest Lumber employees and the other $150 towards maintaining the park.”
25 years ago:
In the June 10, 1992 version of The Lake News, Lake Cowichan’s deputy mayor Jean Brown called for a community forest to be set up.
During a flying visit to the Lake, provincial ombudsman Stephen Owen was approached by Brown with a brief on the subject.
“‘She nipped in pretty smartly,’ the Lake News was told.”
According to the paper, Brown argued that, with Earth Day going on in Brazil, “B.C. and its logging practices will be debated at this conference…We are proud to live in this valley, we are proud of our heritage where our parents and grandparents came to make their homes and, in most cases, to work in the forest industry.
“We have major concerns about what is happening in our forests and how they are being handled. We have felt for some time that if the community of the Cowichan Valley does not address these problems we have let our children down badly.”
40 years ago
“Hit the bricks!” was a common summer slogan for forest workers in B.C. way back when and in The Lake News announced the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) would hold a strike vote before June 15.
“Western regional [IWA] president Jack Munro said the union leadership ‘has no alternative’ because the employers are indicating across the bargaining table they might not be able to pay as much as the maximum six per cent increase allowed in the second year of the federal anti-inflation program.”
The IWA’s main contract covering about 28,000 employees on the B.C. coast, expired June 15, and with the southern Interior contract expiring June 30 and the northern interior union locals’ contract expiring Aug. 30, the woodworkers had a lot of clout.
Holding a strike vote was expensive because of the anti-inflation program but Munro said, “The employer attitude is more callous and less serious than any set of negotiations I’ve been in.”