Deadlines
DEADLINES
OBITS OF MEMORABLE BRITISH COLUMBIANS
Tom Hawthorn
Harbour Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Tom Hawthorn
Photographs copyright the photographers
Kindle edition copyright © 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
Cover design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe
Print edition text design by Mary White
ISBN 978-1-55017-581-3 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-55017-655-1 (ebook)
Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Preface
In these pages you’ll meet some fascinating people. They have two things in common—they all have a connection to British Columbia and they’re all dead.
You’ll meet an aviatrix and a Communist; a boxer named Baby Face and a wrestler called Mean Gene; a yodeling cowboy singer named Alberta Slim and the real-life model for James Bond.
Spoony Singh won and lost fortunes in the sawmill business in British Columbia before opening the Hollywood Wax Museum. Bergie Solberg lived a hermit’s life in the bush on the Sechelt Peninsula, where she was known as the Cougar Lady. Doug Hepburn, born cross-eyed and with a club foot, became the world’s strongest man.
Donald Hings was an inveterate tinkerer credited with inventing the walkie-talkie. Cecil Green was a poor schoolboy who went into electronics, making a fortune at Texas Instruments that he then proceeded to give away.
An obituary is a profile in which the subject cannot grant an interview, so we obituarists behave as newsroom jackals, rending bits of reportage and quotation from reporters who have come before. Perhaps it is for this reason the obituary desk is considered the lowest spot in the newsroom hierarchy. It is a job most typically assigned to cub reporters and burned-out veterans, recovering alcoholics and those who still seek inspiration in the bottom of a bottle. In his novel The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachmann describes the end product of an obituarist’s workday: “decades of a person’s life condensed into a few paragraphs, with a final resting place at the bottom of page nine, between Puzzle-Wuzzle and World Weather.”
Luckily for me, most of these stories originally appeared in the Globe and Mail, for which I also write a human-interest column twice a week. The Globe dedicates a full page of every edition each publication day to obits, following a path blazed by the late Hugh Massingberd, the obituaries editor at The Telegraph in London. As his obit in that paper noted, he “had to reinvent the whole concept of the form, substituting for the grave and ceremonious tribute the sparkling celebration of life.”
Writing an obituary is the most intimate thing you can do with someone you will never meet. I have leafed through diaries, comforted bereaved spouses and uncovered details that even the family doesn’t know.
The resulting stories are neither tribute nor eulogy, nor are they written for the benefit of surviving family members. They are intended to enlighten the reader with anecdotes from a life of interest, giving voice to those who no longer have one. Treat these entries as you might those found in the daily newspaper. Dip into two or three each day, catching up on the passing parade of characters.
Have Christmas dinner in the ruins of an Italian church as enemy shells land nearby; listen to the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost from Saturday morning cartoons; track the Mad Trapper of Rat River across a frozen mountain pass with a police posse; wince from the blows of police truncheons on the head of labour leader Steve Brodie on Bloody Sunday; laugh at the televised misfortune of a snooker player who split the seat of his pants on national television.
In these pages, death is mere detail. These are tales about how lives were lived.
—Tom Hawthorn
Eccentrics
Spoony Singh
Proprietor, Hollywood Wax Museum
(October 20, 1922—October 18, 2006)
Spoony Singh drove a gold Cadillac and preferred a Nehru jacket to a business suit. Though he was not particularly religious, he wore the turban and full beard of an observant Sikh. Patrons of his Hollywood Wax Museum sometimes mistook the proprietor for an exhibit.
The museum, which opened its doors to a half-mile lineup in January 1965, featured lifelike wax statues of presidents and movie stars, as well as religious figures and famous characters from history. A favourite among the faithful was a tableau depicting Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. When a patron complained the museum lacked Jewish heroes, Singh promptly ordered a model of Moses—or, rather, of Charlton Heston as he appeared in The Ten Commandments.
Over time, the flamboyant businessman became nearly as famous as some of the stars to be found inside his attraction. He rode an elephant in parades and appeared regularly in gossip columns. “My family left India because we couldn’t get enough to eat,” he told Hedda Hopper. “Now, I’m paying a doctor to lose weight.” Singh let it be known a rising star had not truly achieved a place in the Hollywood firmament until honoured by placement in his museum.
On November 7, 1965, Singh joined a woman who sold dynamite and another who wrote a syndicated sports column as guests on the network television program What’s My Line? His profession stumped the panel.
He was a showman whose ballyhoo made his museum a great success. The money generated from the tourist attraction built a business empire featuring farming, gold mining and warehousing interests. He also developed property in Mexico and Malibu, the California seaside paradise where he made his home. “I’m making money,” he said in a 1970 interview, “and I’m having a ball.”
Success was all the more remarkable for his having been born into poverty in India. He grew up on Vancouver Island, where his ambitious plans and prodigious energy built a small fortune, which was soon lost. He recovered, only to suffer as many failures as triumphs before striking it rich in wax. His was a life story worthy of Hollywood.
Sampuran Singh Sundher was born at Kotli, a farming village in the hilly Punjab country of British India. Three years later, the village raised funds to send the family to Canada, a generosity whose motive is today unknown, although the Punjab then, as now, was a place of political and religious turmoil.
The family landed in Vancouver just eleven years after the notorious Komagata Maru incident in which a boatload of Sikh immigrants was forced to spend two months at anchor in the harbour before being turned away. The Sundhers settled in Victoria, where his father worked in a sawmill and young “Spoony,” as he was nicknamed by classmates, attended Quadra Elementary and Victoria High School.
A quiet segregation in public spaces was reinforced by federal and provincial laws denying Indo-Canadians the franchise, as well as jobs in the civil service, including