Benvoulin in the ‘40s & ‘50s part 2
Benvoulin Elementary School was situated just west of my parents’ acreage. My sisters and I would walk through Mrs. Finkle and Miss Mooney’s property then through the baseball field at the back of the school, arriving at the school’s front entrance. Benvoulin Elementary had two classrooms and an office: grades 1 – 3 and a grades 4 – 6 classroom.
Continuing into high school, we would catch the school bus to Kelowna Junior High on Richter Street to attend grades 7 – 9, then on to Senior High on Harvey Avenue. (Highway 97) to attend grades 10 – 12. Our school bus driver was Jake Schnurr. For those intending to continue their education at university, there was a classroom above the gym for grade 13 students. Younger students were forbidden access to this area of the school.
Close to the present Benvoulin Heritage Church (Benvoulin Road), were the Culos and Nickles families. The Culoss had twin girls, Lucy and Anita and other siblings who may have been older than them. The Nickles family, Donna and Gordon, lived south of the Culos’. The Nickles were involved in the Benvoulin Church, which was then a United Church. It is presently called the Benvoulin Heritage Church.
A laneway ran off Benvoulin Road and on the corner of the laneway was the Lanz’s property; their children awee Gene, Olivia and Marvin. Down that laneway, toward Mission Creek, was the Dodd home. The Dodd children whom I remember were Beverly, Betty, and Marvin.
When we were children, my two sisters and I would walk from our home on Haynes Road to attend Sunday school at the Benvoulin United Church. This historic church continues to amaze me with its interior and exterior beauty and its dignity, despite its age.
On Byrnes Road heading west, was the Casorso family, the Reids, the Ray Tuckers (my cousins), and the Days. Sharon Reid was a good friend of mine while her brother Bob was in my grade. The Reid family still own this property next door to the Days’ farm. Bob, Sharron and Don Reid are deceased and their youngest brother, Allan remains on the family property on Byrnes Road.
In elementary school, I sat behind Bobby and he was most helpful when I told him I couldn’t read the writing on the blackboard. One day our grade five teacher Mr. Roy Greening asked me what I’d asked Bobby. I told him that I could not see the blackboard and he suggested that I tell my mother that I should see an eye doctor as I might need glasses; he was right.
After leaving Benvoulin Elementary, I attended Kelowna Junior High, then Senior High School. Both schools had an orchestra and a band. I played the violin from grades 7 – 12. My Mum switched my private piano lessons that I took with Dr. Ivan Beadle, to violin as I wanted to improve my skills. My parents encouraged us to practice after school as music lessons were not cheap.
My first orchestra leader in Junior High was Mark Rose. In high school, Garfield McKinley was the orchestra and the band teacher.
I have many memories of growing up in Benvoulin on our farm. Dad raised sheep, the occasional goat, chickens and always a milking cow. We lived on mutton, vegetables, and buckets of raw milk. Mum made every recipe in the book with milk, but our favourite was whipping cream drizzled on top of desserts, especially on Mum’s canned peaches.
Mum also made butter and cottage cheese from time to time; I remember a cheese bag often hanging on the clothesline dripping buttermilk. Mum also canned whatever fruits and vegetables were in season. Canned cherries were one of my favourites.
My parents didn’t own a deep-freeze at that time. On Saturdays, they caught the Silver-Green Bus to town to buy groceries and bring neatly-packaged meat home from their rented frozen food locker. The bus driver was Bill Pavell.
Life was full in those days with few conveniences. When our parents finally bought a car, it was a relief for them to no longer rely on the Silver-Green bus for transportation.
Born with an adventurous spirit, as soon as I graduated from Kelowna Senior High, I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, travelled across Canada to Montreal by train where an Air Force bus picked up the new recruits and brought us to St. Jean, Quebec for basic training.
But that is another story.
LOS ANGELES — Louis Gossett Jr., the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal TV miniseries “Roots,” has died. He was 87.
Gossett’s first cousin Neal L. Gossett told The Associated Press that the actor died in Santa Monica, California. A statement from the family said Gossett died Friday morning. No cause of death was revealed.
Gossett’s cousin remembered a man who walked with Nelson Mandela and who also was a great joke teller, a relative who faced and fought racism with dignity and humour.
“Never mind the awards, never mind the glitz and glamour, the Rolls-Royces and the big houses in Malibu. It’s about the humanity of the people that he stood for,” his cousin said.
Louis Gossett always thought of his early career as a reverse Cinderella story, with success finding him from an early age and propelling him forward, toward his Academy Award for “An Officer and a Gentleman.”
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries “Roots,” which depicted the atrocities of slavery on TV. The sprawling cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton, Ed Asner, John Amos and Robert Reed.
Later that year he played the villianous Henri “Cloche” Bondurant in an adaptation of Peter Benchley’s “The Deep,” which was the eighth-highest grossing film of 1977.
Gossett became the third Black Oscar nominee in the supporting actor category in 1983. He won for his performance as the intimidating Marine drill instructor in “An Officer and a Gentleman” opposite Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role.
“More than anything, it was a huge affirmation of my position as a Black actor,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, “An Actor and a Gentleman.”
The film also won an Oscar for Best Original Song for “Up Where We Belong,” co-written by Buffy Sainte-Marie.
“The role of Master Sergeant Foley was written as a white man. When I visited the Navy Officers Flight Training Center in Pensacola, Florida, I discovered that many of the drill instructors there were men of colour,” director Taylor Hackford said in a statement.
“At that moment I changed the casting profile for Sergeant Foley. Lou Gossett came to see me. He told me he’d served in the U.S. Army as a Ranger, so in addition to being an accomplished actor, he knew military life -- I hired him on the spot.
“Lou Gossett’s Sergeant Foley may have been the first Black character in American cinema to have absolute authority over white characters. The Academy recognized his consummate performance by voting him an Oscar for best supporting actor. He definitely deserved it.”
Gossett had earned his first acting credit in his Brooklyn high school’s production of “You Can’t Take It with You” while he was sidelined from the basketball team with an injury.
“I was hooked -- and so was my audience,” he wrote in his memoir.
His English teacher urged him to go into Manhattan to try out for “Take a Giant Step.” He got the part and made his Broadway debut in 1953 at age 16.
“I knew too little to be nervous,” Gossett wrote. “In retrospect, I should have been scared to death as I walked onto that stage, but I wasn’t.”
Gossett attended New York University on a basketball and drama scholarship. He was soon acting and singing on TV shows hosted by David Susskind, Ed Sullivan, Red Buttons, Merv Griffin, Jack Paar and Steve Allen.
Gossett became friendly with James Dean and studied acting with Marilyn Monroe, Martin Landau and Steve McQueen at an offshoot of the Actors Studio taught by Frank Silvera.
In 1959, Gossett received critical acclaim for his role in the Broadway production of “A Raisin in the Sun” along with Sidney Poitier,Ruby Dee and Diana Sands.
He went on to become a star on Broadway, replacing Billy Daniels in “Golden Boy” with Sammy Davis Jr. in 1964.
Gossett went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961 to make the film version of “A Raisin in the Sun.” He had bitter memories of that trip, staying in a cockroach-infested motel that was one of the few places to allow Black people.
In 1968, he returned to Hollywood for a major role in “Companions in Nightmare,” NBC’s first made-for-TV movie that starred Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and Patrick O’Neal.
This time, Gossett was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios had rented him a convertible. Driving back to the hotel after picking up the car, he was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s officer who ordered him to turn down the radio and put up the car’s roof before letting him go.
Within minutes, he was stopped by eight sheriff’s officers, who had him lean against the car and made him open the trunk while they called the car rental agency before letting him go.
“Though I understood that I had no choice but to put up with this abuse, it was a terrible way to be treated, a humiliating way to feel,” Gossett wrote in his memoir. “I realized this was happening because I was Black and had been showing off with a fancy car -- which, in their view, I had no right to be driving.”
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer, who told him he broke a law prohibiting walking around residential Beverly Hills after 9 p.m. Two other officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was eventually freed when the original police car returned.
“Now I had come face-to-face with racism, and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “But it was not going to destroy me.”
In the late 1990s, Gossett said he was pulled over by police on the Pacific Coast Highway while driving his restored 1986 Rolls Royce Corniche II. The officer told him he looked like someone they were searching for, but the officer recognized Gossett and left.
He founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism doesn’t exist.
Gossett made a series of guest appearances on such shows as “Bonanza,” “The Rockford Files,” “The Mod Squad,” “McCloud” and a memorable turn with Richard Pryor on “The Partridge Family.”
In August 1969, Gossett had been partying with members of the Mamas and the Papas when they were invited to actor Sharon Tate’s house. He headed home first to shower and change clothes. As he was getting ready to leave, he caught a news flash on TV about Tate’s murder. She and others were killed by Charles Manson’s associates that night.
“There had to be a reason for my escaping this bullet,” he wrote.
Louis Cameron Gossett was born on May 27, 1936, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, New York, to Louis Sr., a porter, and Hellen, a nurse. He later added Jr. to his name to honor his father.
“The Oscar gave me the ability of being able to choose good parts in movies like ‘Enemy Mine,’ ‘Sadat’ and ‘Iron Eagle,”’ Gossett said in Dave Karger’s 2024 book “50 Oscar Nights.”
He said his statue was in storage. “I’m going to donate it to a library so I don’t have to keep an eye on it,” he said in the book. “I need to be free of it.”
“We were all so proud of him when he won his Oscar,” Richard Gere said in a statement to People magazine, describing him as “a tough guy with a heart of gold.”
Gossett appeared in such TV movies as “The Story of Satchel Paige,” “Backstairs at the White House, “The Josephine Baker Story,” for which he won another Golden Globe, and “Roots Revisited.”
But he said winning an Oscar didn’t change the fact that all his roles were supporting ones.
He played an obstinate patriarch in the 2023 remake of “The Color Purple.”
Gossett struggled with alcohol and cocaine addiction for years after his Oscar win. He went to rehab, where he was diagnosed with toxic mold syndrome, which he attributed to his house in Malibu.
In 2010, Gossett announced he had prostate cancer, which he said was caught in the early stages. In 2020, he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
He also is survived by sons Satie, a producer-director from his second marriage, and Sharron, a chef whom he adopted after seeing the 7-year-old in a TV segment on children in desperate situations. His first cousin is actor Robert Gossett.
Gossett’s first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled. His second, to Christina Mangosing, ended in divorce in 1975 as did his third to actor Cyndi James-Reese in 1992.