Historical Show staged at the old Women’s Institute Hall —
Gibsons Heritage Playhouse July 14th and 15th
“There we were. If anything brought us together, it was grief. I counted eleven boys from my Grade One picture who were killed in the war. And that was just my Grade One picture.”
So starts The Life We Lived, The War Years, which premiered at Gibsons Heritage Playhouse on Friday, July 14th, 2000. It is one of many war stories told by Sunshine Coast old-timers in a two part historical show begun by Caitlin Hicks in the late Nineties and produced on The Sunshine Coast by Third Coast Theatre in several venues. It shared the evening with stories from Leon Arthur, Cloe Day, Ethel McNutt, Richard Birkin, Tommy Ono, June Percival, Marilyn Wigard and others. Both evenings featured well known Sunshine Coast performers Caitlin Hicks, Dave Short, Colleen Elson, Bernie Garrison and Maggie Guzzi. For The War Years, music of the era was provided by Nikki Weber and the Ladybugs .
Stories from “The War Years” include personal testimony about the war — Tommy Ono, one of the coast’s few residents of Japanese descent who were relocated to Vancouver when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor told his own story; June Percival of Garden Bay and Noriko McKee of Roberts Creek, who were both born during the war, tell of their discovery of their parents’ unspoken secret; Leon Arthur of Gibsons unravels how he unwittingly helped create the Atom bomb which decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; one woman loses her fiance; another, Cloe Day tries to join up; Richard Birkin is rejected for service because of a heart murmur and then goes on to create parts for the B-29 Bombers; Marilyn Wigard has a rendezvous to buy shoes early on Armistice Day before the parade. Barbara Higgins of the Sechelt Nation, told several stories.
The original show, THE LIFE WE LIVED, part of the Sechelt Heritage Project featured The Sunshine Coast Jazz Band with Mick Bryant, Ken Grunenberg, Dave Morgan and Graham Walker.
Re-named for the stage show in 2000, “THE LIFE WE LIVED – Everybody’s Related to Everybody” featured stories by Lewella Duncan, Cynthia Culbard Jones and Diana Culbard Peters, Pixie Daly, Violet Winegarden, Maribel Holland, and Roberta McKibben and Mary O’Brian. Cloe Day’s story hilarious story tells about the tough and lonely life of teaching; Ethel Mc Nutt shares her life as a cook in a logging camp and Richard Birkin, a short history of the ferries and buses.
Music for “Everybody’s Related to Everybody” was provided by the quartet After Hours with Brian Corbett, Patti Pollack, Brian Harbison & Mary Ellen Scribner.
Historical incidents both local and international are featured as part of the stories: the 1946 earthquake, the depression, the Daddy Boat, The Bone Shaker, The May Day Parade, Sechelt children sent to Residential School, Black Ball Ferries. Institutions and buildings featured in these stories are: the chapel at St. Mary’s Hospital in Garden Bay (Luella Duncan was the first bride to be married there), the canning factory under the Gibsons Landing Pack label, Sechelt’s first shoe store, Standard Motors garage on the corner of Highway 101 and Wharf in Sechelt, the Women’s Institute Hall in Gibsons, the Roberts Creek dock and the Garden Bay Pub.
