His father suffered a business failure and became incapacitated by asthma the summer Spoony graduated from high school. At seventeen, Spoony became the primary breadwinner of a family of six. He found work in a shingle mill, saving money to buy a truck to deliver firewood to homes. He was hired as a foreman at a piecework lumber mill, only to have the day shift walk out to protest having to work for “a Hindu,” said his son, Meva Sundher. When Singh was instead assigned to the night shift, his reforms so improved production that day-shift workers asked to work split shifts to reap the benefits.
A shrewd entrepreneur, Singh parlayed this modest beginning into a thriving enterprise. He built Ace Sawmill at Plumper Bay in Esquimalt and operated a logging camp near Port Alberni. He was also responsible for the logging on the north slope of Mount Newton on the Saanich Peninsula north of Victoria. While his son said he had to declare bankruptcy more than once, Singh had enough success by 1954 to build a gracious, four-bedroom private home in the Art Moderne style on Peacock Hill in suburban Saanich. By then, he had married Chanchil Kour Hoti in a union arranged by their families. The pair only agreed to marriage after insisting on going out on chaperoned dates. The residence at 3210 Bellevue Road, no longer in family hands, has been designated a heritage house.
The forestry industry has always been a boom-and-bust business. Singh diversified his interests and satisfied his own fun-loving spirit by opening a roadside amusement park called Spoony’s. He offered trampolines for acrobatic guests and built his own go-karts powered by motors scavenged from chainsaws.
While enjoying drinks with his cronies at a Victoria bar, Singh learned of a business opportunity. A former luggage shop and brassiere factory was vacant at 6767 Hollywood Boulevard, just a block east of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and its famous sidewalk with the handprints and footprints of the stars. With the theatre already famous as a draw, the wax museum became a second landmark destination for tourists. Suspecting a better cover story might generate interest, Singh told reporters he opened the museum because he had been shocked on a visit not to have seen any stars on the streets of Hollywood.
The owner was a natural at generating publicity. A 1965 preview offered writers “Bloody Marys and horror d’oeuvres.” Another time, he got Louis Armstrong to pose beside a paraffin doppelgänger while blowing a trumpet. The photograph ran in several newspapers. The Chicago Daily Defender, with an African-American readership, noted the problem of identification in the caption. “He’s on the left . . . no, he’s on the right . . . wait a minute, let me think . . . that’s the real ‘Satchmo’ on the left.”
Populated mostly by movie stars (Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Errol Flynn, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Tallulah Bankhead, Rudolph Valentino), the museum later added more figures from television and pop culture, including Glen Campbell and Sonny and Cher. A figure of Martin Luther King was installed within weeks of his assassination in 1968.
A typical shopping expedition for Singh included purchasing unwanted movie props—an Iron Maiden, a bed of nails and a rubber shark from which protruded a man’s leg. He also came to own a pair of pajamas that had belonged to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner.
Petty thievery cost the museum about $200 every month, as customers made off with Gandhi’s spectacles, Winston Churchill’s cigars and Raquel Welch’s brassieres. The owner suspected teenagers were responsible. “At that age,” he chuckled, “I probably would have done the same thing myself.” The four Beatles were displayed behind glass, from which lipstick imprints had to be cleaned before the start of business every day. Despite the security precautions, someone once stole the right hand of drummer Ringo Starr. A wire-service story on the thefts earned Singh far more in publicity than it cost to replace props.
More serious vandalism occurred in 1973, when twenty-nine figures were mutilated overnight. Among the victims were Elton John and six presidents (Grant, Hoover, Truman, Coolidge, McKinley and Eisenhower). The religious statues were left untouched, as were presidents Nixon and Kennedy. A fire six years later damaged about seventy figures at a cost of more than $250,000 US. The casualties included Stalin and Churchill, as well as Raquel Welch.
With the museum as the anchor of a growing empire, Singh indulged such other interests as gold mining in Mexico and farming in Yuba City, California. He operated warehouses in Thousand Oaks, California; bought the movie theatre across the street from the wax museum, which now operates as the Hollywood Guinness World of Records Museum; and opened a second branch of the Hollywood Wax Museum at Branson, Missouri. The latter includes a faux Mount Rushmore with America’s greatest presidents replaced by busts of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin. This exquisite bit of kitsch was Singh’s idea.
Singh befriended many of the stars he immortalized in wax. One he did not get to meet was Marilyn Monroe, who appeared in the museum trying to hold down her white skirt in the famous scene from The Seven Year Itch. Singh, a fan of her obvious appeals, particularly enjoyed the whimsical nature of her display. He felt too many patrons left his museum in a sombre state after viewing The Last Supper. It was his long-unfulfilled dream to install a sidewalk air jet at the museum’s exit. That, he felt, would have left them laughing.
He died of congestive heart failure at his Malibu home two days before what would have been his eighty-fourth birthday.
October 31, 2006
Bergie Solberg
Cougar Lady
(September 5, 1923—November 13, 2002)
The body of the Cougar Lady was found on the floor of her shack, where her companion, a dog named Bush, stood lonely vigil for two days. Bergie Solberg was seventy-nine.
Solberg spent her life roaming the mountains and ocean inlets of the Sechelt Peninsula on the Sunshine Coast, surviving on her wiles as a hunter, trapper and logger. A herd of goats provided fresh milk, which she drank raw. The goats also acted as lure for cougars, which she killed.
Ken Collins, a reporter who visited her isolated cabin, tells a story of her fearlessness. Alerted by her dog to the presence of a cougar, an unarmed Solberg chased the wild cat up a tree before returning to her cabin for her rifle. “She was something Walt Disney would like to make a story of,” he said. Solberg skinned cougars for their pelts and sold them, as she did those of bobcats and river otters. A deadeye shot at four hundred paces, she patiently tracked quarry for days, scrambling over mountains and pushing through dense underbrush with her head down and shoulders hunched.
Over time, civilization encroached on her seventy-hectare property, a wilderness paradise accessible only by boat. A multimillion-dollar real-estate development was built just two kilometres away. At night, owners of waterfront properties could hear the distinct putt-putt of her boat’s 50-hp engine as they lounged in hot tubs. Her own shack lacked electricity and running water.
“There’s not many animals left,” she once complained to reporter Keith Thirkell. “Many people are moving to Sechelt, building houses, and more people are sport hunting, which scares away the game.”
After the death of her older sister, she was a last living reminder of a celebrated way of life otherwise confined to memory and history books.
Herman Solberg, a logger from Norway, moved his wife, Olga, and two daughters, Minnie and Bergliot Asta, to Sandy Hook on the peninsula in 1928. Bergie, as she was called, and Minnie joined their father in the woods, learning the dangerous job of logging. She took over her father’s trapping permit after his death, selling mink and raccoon pelts to city furriers.
The Solberg sisters lived alone. They had little use for the conveniences of the modern age, preferring the solitary independence of the old-time homesteader. They spoke to one another in Norwegian and their English carried the accent of a homeland they could barely remember.
Over the years, Minnie Solberg settled in at an old logging camp at Deserted Bay. The closest store was fifty kilometres away. The sisters were not an uncommon sight in Sechelt, visiting monthly for provisions. Bergie Solberg wore a heavy purple cowboy hat, the weight of which left the tops of her ears bent like