B. C. centenarian’s life story makes for fascinating read
“When I was a young fellow I was pretty sure I was going to be a great man and go down in history. Then when I saw how tough that was I decided to settle for just making a lot of money. Then when I saw how hard that was I settled for just earning a living and keeping my wife and kids fed and clothed, and even that was touch and go at times.” So says longtime Pender Harbour resident and newly minted centenarian Frank White in That Went By Fast: My First Hundred Years, an absorbing account of his hard- working life up and down the southwest coast of B. C.
Frank White’s working life began when he was a brighteyed boy of eight years old, in his father’s butcher shop in rural Abbotsford; “I used to like to startle the neighbourhood ladies by getting up on my butter box so I could see over the counter and steel a butcher knife half as long as I was, while I politely asked them what I could get them.” By the relatively ripe age of 13, White was making deliveries in his father’s Model T Ford, driving ( unlicensed, of course) on the back roads of the central Fraser Valley. By the early 1930s he was driving milk trucks, a foot soldier in what White describes as a “Wild West- style battle for the Abbotsford trucking business.”
This meant that he was perfectly placed for the advent of truck- based logging in the mid- 1930s, a development that would revolutionize the logging industry for a generation. “It was the one time in my life I saw history in the making and actually took part in it myself.”
I used to like to startle the neighbourhood ladies by getting up on my butter box so I could see over the counter and steel a butcher knife half as long as I was, while I politely asked them what I could get them. FRANK WHITE AUTHOR OF THAT WENT FAST: MY FIRST HUNDRED YEARS
Suddenly it had become technically possible — and financially viable — for even a small operator to push logging roads up into the remoter valleys, areas that had previously been considered inaccessible, and bring out old- growth timber to be milled. White drove trucks on Vedder Mountain, near Abbotsford, for one of the first outfits to try this new method of logging, but he chafed at having to work for wages while others were getting rich.
As he was to learn, though, getting rich takes more than hard work and determination.
During his 30s, White drove trucks for and operated logging outfits throughout B. C.’ s southwest: in Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, near Boston Bar up the Fraser Canyon, in Estero Basin north of Campbell River, and out of Green Bay on Nelson Island.
But as the price of logging lots climbed higher and higher, the era of the small, “gyppo” logging operators was drawing to a close, and White eventually found himself back in Pender Harbour, “40 and broke,” wondering “what’s next?” Well, there were still a few more minicareers ahead of him, one of which saw Frank and his wife Kay opening and operating a gas and service station, and a period of over 15 years when White was the maintenance man for the local water district.
The last third of That Went By Fast — titled “The Luckiest Man in Pender Harbour” — covers what White calls “the final chapter” of his life.
Widowed at the age of 63, he eventually took up with another local iconoclast, former New Yorker writer Edith Iglauer, author of the classic Fishing With John, which describes her marriage to John Daly, a commercial fisherman who operated a 41- foot troller out of Pender Harbour. The pairing of a “gyppo” logger and a New Yorker writer might seem an unlikely alliance ( as White puts it: “People always want to know how a fine lady like Edith got hooked up with a bush ape like me”), but the relationship obviously works.
Some may know that Frank White’s publishers are his son and daughter- in- law Howard and Mary White, whose Harbour Publishing, based on the Sunshine Coast, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. That Went By Fast is an excellent example of the kind of vivid local stories that Harbour has been publishing so successfully for 40 years; It is, in Howard White’s words, “a typical Harbour book — full of authentic knowledge about life on the B. C. coast during the past century and meant to be read mostly by the community out of which it grew.”
Frank White’s life has been one of perseverance and adaptation, and That Went By Fast is a refreshing antidote to the flood of celebrity memoirs and biographies that dominate the genre. It is a highly entertaining account of an unconventional life lived in the smaller communities of our province, and in the logging camps scattered through the valleys and inlets of B. C.’ s southwest coast.