Jack Cruickshank has lived in West Vancouver almost every one of his 88 years. His family's links with the community reach back even further.
In the spring of 1918, the Hounds, "a group of us fellows who chummed together," decided to set up a summer camp. The writer is Jack's father, Jack Cruickshank senior. In later life, he wrote of days at the beach and midnight swims in the altogether, of the West Vancouver Amateur Swim Club and the annual Swim Regatta founded by the Hounds. The Hounds - Jack Cruickshank, Harry Thorley, Wally Hunter, Bill Strang, John McGillivray and Herb Ballantyne - set up the Kennel in a tent at 17th Street and Fulton Avenue, where West Vancouver's municipal hall now stands. Cutting it close to, or sometimes past, departure time, they frequently finished dressing aboard the ferries on their daily commutes to their city jobs. In 1920, the Hounds shifted the Kennel to Dundarave and there they summered every year until the pack dispersed in1924. In 1921, Mary Holt purchased a lot at 2586 Marine Dr. with money saved from the housekeeping allowance. Her sons cleared space for a tent and later for a cabin where daughters Bess and Marjorie lived when they worked at the B.C. Telephone Company at Marine Drive and 17th Street.
Bess Holt married Jack Cruickshank senior in November 1924 and the newlyweds purchased the Dundarave property, living there with son Jack and daughter Diane until 1955. The house still stands, significantly altered, with the original cabin somewhere inside.
Jack was in his 20s when he noticed his father writing in the evenings. "I got reading all this," he recalls, "and I got interested. Anything I wanted to know about my parents' past, there it was for all to see."
Jack senior was writing about expanding the cabin for his family. He wrote about the garden he created on that property and at the family's next home at 22nd Street and Mathers Avenue. He wrote about cars bought and sold, pets lost and found, about the activities of in-laws, relatives, friends and neighbours.
He gave his son a knife in 1983. It came with a letter describing the presentation of the knife to his father, George Cruickshank, in 1875. By 1891, George and Isabella Cruikshank were living in Vancouver, friends with a CPR porter named Joe Fortes. Calculating from today, the knife and those family stories reach back 140 years. Young Jack was interested in his family history but jazz was, and is, his passion. He and his cousin Les Farewell made their way to Los Angeles. The plan was to find work. "But we had too much of a good time, spent all our money and came back home." They saw Kid Ory's Creole Jazz Band performing at the Rendezvous Ballroom, the first of several trips south to enjoy New Orleans jazz.
Jack was introduced to Alice Price by his sister Diane and her husband, orthodontist Art Fraser. They married in 1967 and, with son David, lived in North Vancouver before settling in West Vancouver. Jack rose to senior mechanical designer for D.W. Thomson consulting engineers, retiring in 1996.
Alice had joined the Pump Primers exercise program at West Vancouver United Church and Jack soon joined the class. His duties there have grown since he was widowed almost two years ago. Three mornings a week, courtesy of Jack, the lights go on early at the church. He starts the coffee, sets out cups and spoons and helps lay out the gym mats.
Jack did not forget his father's handwritten stories, now housed in the West Vancouver Archives. He has made his own contribution to his community's historic record: Jack senior patrolling his home block as an air raid warden in the Second World War; street plans of the Dundarave and Ambleside businesses of his youth; Marine Drive and 25th Street as it was in the 1930s and '40s.
Both Jack Cruickshanks, father and son, write about daily life in their home community. Together they have created an invaluable portrait, drawn from living memory, of the "self-contained paradise," as Jack junior describes it, that West Vancouver was.
