IN 2005 Ernest Fitch turned 100.
At that venerable age, the North Vancouver resident recorded his memories. His family, ranging from three children to one great greatgrandchild, received a copy of three hour-long CDs.
"We listened to it all," recalls Ernest's son, Allen, 82, "and man alive, he remembers things from years ago that I would have forgotten. It's authentic all the way. If a family can do it, they should do it."
"Yes, those memories are important for the family. Of course, it helps that I'm a gas bag," laughs his father, whose voice is as firm and warm as his handshake and whose memory is razor sharp.
Ernest Fitch was born on June 20, 1905, in Miss Roycroft's Nursing Home in Vancouver's West End. The family lived at the corner of Grant and Cotton Streets in the Grandview area of South Vancouver.
Ernest didn't see much of his father, the stable boss at Crystal Dairy, but George Fitch figures in his son's earliest memories.
He remembers getting off the streetcar with his father, who went into a corner market and came out with the biggest, reddest apple young Ernest had ever seen.
The apple was "for Mother and the seventh baby that was on the way," Ernest recalls, to be delivered, as he and his brothers and sisters believed, in the doctor's black bag.
Another memory may have set Ernest on the road towards his vocation. While attending a meeting of the Salvation Army with his father, he recalls, "An officer asked, 'Do you want to be good like your dad?' Well, of course, I did." Ernest was nine years old. He was 11 when his father went off to war and 13 when he was killed at Amiens, France in August 1918.
With no pension for veterans in those days, Ernest and his sister left school to support the family. After a year as an office boy in the department of soldiers' civil re-establishment, Ernest joined the Royal Bank in a similar position at the same wages, $50 a month. He kept $5 for car fare and the occasional ice cream, and the rest went to his mother.
Seven years later, a teller earning $125 a month with a promising future at the bank, Ernest went as usual to a Salvation Army service.
"That night, one of the officers sang 'As the fisherman heard by Galilee, take up your cross and follow me,' and it hit me like a thunderbolt, that I was called to join the Salvation Army," he says.
Ernest and his wife, Gladys Emily Venn, raised three children and lived all over Canada in their life with the Salvation Army.
"When we went to Estevan in southeast Saskatchewan, we ran into the worst part of the Depression," he says. "That part of the country had 10 years of drought, no rain, no crops. We did get a lot of help as a community, we ministers distributed food that came from different parts of the country in railway boxcars."
Ernest had risen to the rank of full colonel and supervised 13 seniors' residences and 19 men's social departments when he retired in 1970. He jokes that he plans to live at least until his next birthday, "When I will have been retired for the same number of years that I worked for the army."
Ernest is the Salvation Army's longest serving member. "I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if I'd stayed in banking," he says. "I know I would never have had the satisfaction at the bank, of the friends - hundreds of friends - the opportunities and the variety that the Salvation Army gave."
"I have some glorious memories, I really do," he adds. "I lie in bed at night and think of them, these people that I knew. I didn't appreciate them at the time. How good they were, that's the important thing."
I beg to differ. There can be no doubt that Ernest was appreciated by the people he met along life's road.
Why? Because we return our appreciation to those who appreciate us. This modest value is at the heart of Ernest Fitch's life.
Ernest Fitch can be heard on the 100 at 100 project at CBC Radio's The Current, the voices of 100 Canadians over 100 years old. The link is: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/ 100at100/2010/11/16/-16-ernest-fitch.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or email her at [email protected].
