Grandview Commerce’s class of ’47
Alumni look back on their high school days to celebrate 70 years since their graduation
Such are life’s sweet little ironies. “When I was in junior high at Templeton they gave us an aptitude assessment to decide which path we should take,” Merrill Gordon said. “It looked like I should be in the labour group so I put down L, but my Ls look like Cs.” The rest, as they say, is history. Gordon was one of 11 alumni of Grandview High School of Commerce who celebrated the class’s 70th-anniversary reunion in Vancouver last Saturday.
The retired businessman is the only surviving male of the alum, but there were only five to begin with way back in 1947 when the class graduated.
“When I got into the commerce school because my L looked like a C, there were only five boys and 30 girls,” Gordon recalled. “I decided I was in the right place.”
Florence Allardice (née DiFlorio), whose parents were born in Italy, recalls facing discrimination as a young girl because of her Italian heritage, until she attended Grandview Commerce.
Their Japanese friends had been interned in the Interior, but otherwise the high school was a melting pot, a regular United Nations.
“The students were from all walks of life, we were all friends. There was no racial prejudice,” Allardice said.
The point was only driven home at the June 17 reunion when a historian from the Vancouver school board showed up and interviewed the alumni about where their parents were from.
Students’ parents hailed from Britain, Western Europe, Russia, Ukraine, China, Yugoslavia and Poland.
“We had Chinese food with chopsticks, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, Italian food my mom made, it was wonderful,” Allardice said.
They grew up during the Great Depression, graduated with the Marshall Plan to salvage Europe about to be implemented and the Cold War just over the horizon.
In 1934, when Gordon was four, his family loaded up their 1922 Ford and headed West.
They were turned back at the B.C. border by the provincial police because they had no means of support.
“So we sold the car and landed in Burnaby with 34 cents,” Gordon said. “That was the Depression.”
That class of 40-something — the number is uncertain because some students attended some classes but were not part of the graduating class — grew close, as is evident by how they have stayed in touch these seven decades.
“We’ve remained good friends ever since we graduated,” Allardice said. “It was a pleasure to be at that school. We didn’t want to go home after classes.
“The teachers were so interesting. We’d stay after school and talk politics and current affairs.”
Grandview Commerce was a high school to prepare students for careers in office work and the business world.
The teachers were a diverse crew who introduced the students to poetry, theatre, photography, sports and operettas.
“One day, a teacher came in and said she’d been at a folk festival and there was no Canadian songs or dances there,” Gordon said. “She said, ‘I want to teach you guys to square dance.’
“Miss Stirk, she was the godmother of square dancing in B.C.” gordmcintyre@postmedia.com twitter.com/gordmcintyre