Jim Thomson's legacy to the North Shore has been decades in the making.
It can be seen in the houses he designed and built, right down to the furniture, with his own two hands. It's with the dinghies and paddleboards and the art frames that supplemented his teaching income, and in the bracelets, intricately inlayed, that he makes as gifts. He creates beautiful, useful articles from natural materials, particularly wood - much of it swapped, scrounged or salvaged - and sometimes saved for years until restored and repurposed. Jim's legacy is about craftsmanship and conservation, and confidence in one's abilities.
It's a legacy built over a lifetime and instilled into the hearts and minds of his students during Jim's 35 years as an industrial education teacher at West Vancouver secondary.
The house where Jim was born in 1921 was built by a craftsman, a carpenter named Brown. It still stands on Moody Avenue in North Vancouver. The year he turned 75, Jim knocked on the door of his family home and was invited inside. The Rogers Majestic radio that could tune into Victoria was gone but the wainscoting and picture rails, the leaded glass and light switches original to the house are still there.
There were few houses in the area when Jim and his brother Willie were boys. Willie, four years younger, was too young to follow his brother up into the surrounding trees. With his friend, Robin Sinclair, Jim would climb until the treetops bent over, allowing them to step across to the next tree and then the next. "We could make it almost the length of the block along the tops of the trees. That's how much bush there was."
He started out building chicken houses on Bill Brown's farm off Lillooet Road and graduated to building the Brown family's new house. He worked with an Australian carpenter named Frank Arnold Smith who "taught me there's nothing in a house one man can't lift by himself. If he takes it one step at a time, nothing is beyond his capabilities."
Jim was an inspector with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, saving every cent he could spare towards the house he planned to build. That house, still standing on Inglewood Avenue in West Vancouver, was finished to the move-in stage in 1950, in time for Jim's marriage to Madeleine Humphrey. "I hitched up the oil stove the morning of our wedding," he says.
Jim had trained as a shops teacher after the war, starting his career at West Vancouver high school in 1948. For the first year, shop classes were conducted in a converted coal bin under the gymnasium.
"The sawdust flew when a basketball game was on," he says.
By the time Jim retired in 1983, industrial education was housed in a wing of its own.
In constructing the Thomson family's next home, Jim rigged up a labour-saving device that became a neighborhood attraction. With ball bearings for wheels and a single gear powered by a washing machine motor, Jim's miniature railroad transported rock for the fireplace from the creek out back. There were 25 children in the neighbourhood in the late 1950s, including Jim and Maddie's two, and every one rode the Thomson rails.
Inside the house, Jim points out salvaged materials, some collected before the war.
Teak for a living room lamp and the legs of the dining table had been panelling in the CN steamship Prince Robert before the vessel's conversion to an armed merchant cruiser.
The fireplace hearths are made from marble saved from the demolished Vancouver police building acquired in a trade for a woodworking commission. Jim Thomson is a craftsman who built his homes to last using repurposed materials, recycling rather than loading up landfills - a meaningful legacy for anyone. Jim has an extra gift and it's for everyone on the North Shore.
Blessed at the age of 93 with excellent recall, a mind for detail and a way with a story, he remembers life as it was here on the north side of the inlet. There are others like Jim with their own memories of life in North and West Vancouver. They are our community treasures.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. 778-279-2275 [email protected]
