The Robson shoe repair and other oddities

For some reason the earliest issues of the Castle News (which later became the Castlegar News) from 1947 and 1948 have never been microfilmed. The only way to read them is to view the originals at the Station Museum. I did so recently while trying to figure out when the Eremenko department store opened (Dec. 20, 1947, it turns out).

These early mimeographed editions are quite charming. Proprietor Les Campbell, who started the paper as a way to promote the Castle Theatre, which he also owned, drew the ads by hand. One that caught my attention in the edition of April 15, 1948, was for Pete’s Shoe Repair, described as “200 yds from Castlegar Ferry, Robson Side.”

The depiction of the shop was crude, but instantly recognizable to me as the home at 2605 Broadwater Road. The front door overhang is still there but the door itself is not.

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Ads from the Castle News of April 15 and May 20, 1948

2605 Broadwater Road

The building was probably fairly new when the shoe repair operated there, but for some reason the property doesn’t show up on BC Assessment’s map, which would otherwise give us an approximate construction date.

I haven’t had any luck figuring out who Pete the proprietor was. The civic directories around that time don’t list any shoe repairs in Robson. Nor can I find any ads for the business beyond 1948, so I imagine it was short-lived.

Centenarians of note

I keep a running list of local centenarians. Three recent additions to the list deserve mention.

A recent obituary for longtime Nelson resident Nina (Noakes) Smiley revealed she died three days after her 100th birthday, a milestone that had been her goal to attain. 

She also spent part of her childhood living aboard a Kootenay Lake sternwheeler. Although she was mostly raised in Oregon, “Her mother brought her and her siblings to Longbeach in 1936, where they lived on the grounded Kuskanook paddlewheeler.” They weren’t there for very long, but how many other people can make a similar claim?

According to Ted Affleck’s A Century of Paddlewheelers in the Pacific Northwest, the Yukon, and Alaska, the Kuskanook was built in 1906 and operated until 1931, whereupon it was sold to Arthur Pochin to use as a floating hotel. The boat was anchored at Kokanee Landing for that purpose in the summer of 1932, then moved to Nelson, but it doesn’t appear to have operated again as a hotel.

Pochin announced in 1936 that he would have the ship cut into sections that could be used as cottages or boathouses. Evidently Nina Smiley and her family lived in one of those remnants. The Kuskanook’s ladies saloon has been on the grounds of the SS Moyie in Kaslo since the early 2000s.

Meanwhile, I was surprised to see an obituary in the May 23 edition of The Vancouver Sun for Fumiko (Fumi) Nakade, who died at 101. She and her family had been interned at Grand Forks during the Second World War. My surprise was doubled (trebled? quadrupled?) when in the same edition of the paper I found a second obituary for a centenarian who was interned at Grand Forks! Kazuo (Kaz) Arai was 102.

It is not widely known that Grand Forks was home to Japanese-Canadian internees, because it was neither an official internment camp, nor an official self-supporting camp, although it functioned like one of the latter. A new book that is the result of an international collaboration looks into this.

Fraser’s Landing makes a comeback

As a news reporter, I spend a lot of time consulting the online map of DriveBC. While it’s very helpful, sometimes you’ll come across the strangest things. DriveBC suggests key Kootenay communities include Nelson, Castlegar, Creston, Salmo, Kaslo, and … Fraser?

This is an anachronism that almost makes sense. Fraser — more commonly Fraser’s Landing — was just west of Balfour and until 1947 it was the western terminal for the Kootenay Lake ferry. So you can imagine some ancient Department of Highways map suggested it was an important location and this was somehow transposed onto the DriveBC map.

However, zoom in a little closer on DriveBC and you discover that the map places Fraser on the wrong side of the lake. It should be on the north side, but it shows up on the south side, between Sunshine Bay and Procter.

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