100 YEARS OF KITSILANO HIGH
A journey back through the history of a school that so many students — including movie star Ryan Reynolds, who ‘loved’ being there — have attended with pride, energy and strong alumni support
Theresa Cotton scrolls, transfixed, through a scrapbook of 1940s newspaper clippings about her school.
“It’s weird to think it actually happened right here,” said the Grade 12 Kitsilano Secondary student. “In this school, on these grounds, in this neighbourhood.”
“It’s history you can really connect to,” said her friend Sam Kerr.
For a century now, the school has been the heart of a neighbourhood constantly reinventing itself, not unlike the rapidly evolving city around it. From swampland on the edge of a First Nations village, to rough-hewed working-class district, to hippie haven, to immigrant enclave, to the land of yoga millionaires.
But at Kitsilano High, the past is still, always, very present.
Kits principal Ranjit Bains has worked at other Vancouver public schools, but when she arrived at Kits, something struck her.
“What I noticed right off the bat was the pride,” Bains said this week. “Not all schools have that strong pride and that strong of an alumni culture. From my experience, it’s something that’s unique here.”
Not every B.C. school still stands and sings its school song at every assembly, said Craig Brumwell, a Kits teacher since 1988. Kits has always been “a place where it’s OK to be excited about your school,” he said.
Brumwell recalled the start of one school year a decade ago, when a new administrator attended his first Kits assembly.
“Everybody stood up at the end and sang the old song, and the walls were shaking, the place went off,” Brumwell said. “I just remember looking over at him, and his mouth was open, he was like: ‘What was that?’ And I just said, ‘Welcome to Kits.’”
Most of the grads interviewed for this story volunteered that they still know all the words to the 1936-penned anthem “Hail Kitsilano” — and when to pump your fist, shouting, ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’
All that “rah rah” can seem, to the uninitiated, kind of odd.
People who attended other schools sometimes question why Steve Rai, class of ’84 and now a deputy chief of Vancouver Police, has such a passion for his high school, more than three decades after graduating.
Rai said his wife sometimes asks him: “‘Why are you so esprit de corps about Kitsilano? You know, I went to high school, too.’”
He tells her if she came from where he did, she’d understand.
The school is hosting a centennial celebration on May 12. Because of limited capacity in the building, people are encouraged to register online at www.kits100. org, or phone 604 713-8961. The welcoming ceremony includes the Vancouver Police Pipe Band and a 1940s-style swing and jive dance performance by Cotton and Kerr.
Bains said she was surprised at the number of families with Kits students across generations. (Full disclosure, these families include this Vancouver Sun reporter, his sister, father, aunts, uncle and cousins.)
Kitsilano also runs in the family of one of the school’s most famous grads. Actor Ryan Reynolds (class of ‘94) told The Vancouver Sun this week: “I loved being at Kits . ... My grandmother went to the school as well. Last I checked, her graduation picture is still on the wall and still giving me the hairy eyeball for not getting better grades in math.”
EARLY YEARS AND WARTIME
When Kitsilano High School opened in 1917, the neighbourhood around it had already borne the name for more than a decade, derived from Chief Khatsahlano, a Squamish chief born in Xwayxway, a village in what is now Stanley Park.
Despite the modern reputation of Kits as a trendy and expensive neighbourhood, it has had a bluecollar character for most of its history, providing housing for working-class families, including many immigrants. Vancouver’s first Sikh temple opened in Kits in 1908. Before nearby West Broadway became the heart of the city’s Hellenic community, immigrants from Greece made Kits their home. Among the early Greek pioneers was the family of George Dimitri Athans, a diver who represented Canada at the 1936 Berlin Olympics when he was a 15-year-old Kits student.
A key piece of next month’s centennial event blends 2018 technology and 1940s artifacts, forging the bond between present and past in Kits High hallways.
Brumwell’s social studies students have undertaken a project researching the stories of Kits students who travelled overseas during the Second World War and never returned. For the “Kits Fallen” project, students created digital presentations about the young people who lost their lives serving during the war, investigating their subjects through government and military archives, Kits yearbooks, and the newspaper scrapbook and letter-writing campaign launched during wartime by then-Kits librarian Helen Creelman.
Erik Butterfield, a Grade 12 Kits student and Seaforth Highlanders cadet, will be on hand May 12 to help attendees engage with the multimedia project. “I feel a lot of connection with those (soldiers),” said Butterfield, 17. “That could have been me back then.”
PEACETIME AND THE HIPPIE SCENE
The postwar years of the 1940s and ’50s in Kits were “an idyllic time,” recalls Jack Lee, of the class of ’54. Before Lee became the first Chinese-Canadian staff reporter at The Vancouver Sun, he had his “first taste of journalism” when he covered sports for KHS Life, the school’s award-winning paper, he recalled this week.
Lee’s good friend and classmate Roy Peterson also got some early experience at KHS Life before he spent 47 years as editorial cartoonist for The Vancouver Sun, winning his seventh National Newspaper Award in 1998, a record that still stood when he died in 2013.
The two friends enjoyed some great times at Kits, including two lunch-hour concerts in the school auditorium by Louis Armstrong and his All- Stars in 1951 and 1952.
“The applause was deafening,” Lee recalled. “We nudged each other, and said: ‘Is this for real?’ Rock ’n’ roll had not yet come in back then, and Louis Armstrong was a big, big deal.”
By Jerry Kruz’s own description, he wasn’t an avid scholar when he attended Kits in the 1960s. By age 16, he’d pretty much stopped attending class and was busy running one of North America’s first psychedelic dance halls just up the road from the school. The year Kruz was supposed to graduate from Kits, he brought the Grateful Dead to play his venue, the Afterthought, at West 4th and Arbutus.
A burgeoning counterculture scene developed around the Afterthought, Kruz recalled, adding: “The whole of 4th Avenue, we were trying to make that the answer to Haight Street in San Francisco. And we did!
“It was the epicentre,” Kruz said. “The whole drug scene was just happening in Kits at that time, and that’s why the principal and the mayor and everybody was just freaking out.”
BLUE DEMONS SPORTS
When Mary McIlwaine (class of ’63) showed up at the start of her Grade 10 year, she had a good how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation story. That August, 14-yearold McIlwaine (then Mary Stewart) swam for Canada at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Shortly after returning to Vancouver, she attended a meeting to prepare for a high school swim meet.
To McIlwaine’s shock, her PE teacher had organized a parade to welcome her home from the Olympics. “I didn’t expect anyone to notice I had been away,” McIlwaine recalled this week. “But students came in chanting, holding signs that said, ‘Welcome back Mary.’”
Loma McKenzie, the PE teacher who organized the surprise celebration for McIlwaine, was and remains an iconic figure at Kits, where she graduated in 1939 and then taught PE for more than three decades, from 1947 to 1982. Her 2016 Vancouver Sun obituary described her as “a true patriot of Kits.”
Kits has a tradition of venerated, tough-but-fair, PE teachers, names that loom large in the school’s lore. Many were former Kits students who returned to teach there for decades, making an impact not only in class but by volunteering thousands of hours coaching.
Kathleen Heddle (class of ‘83) remembers how the PE teachers “taught me to push myself, be aggressive on the court, have a competitive spirit, all which definitely helped me years later.”
Heddle, who described herself as a “mediocre athlete during my time at Kits,” went on to become, with her rowing partner Marnie McBean, the first Canadians to win three Olympic gold medals.
Deputy Chief Rai said those PE teachers’ tough-love lessons stuck with him on his way to becoming one of Vancouver’s top cops.
“They were tough with us,” he said. “It built a little bit of strength and character for later on.”
Kits had “a very eclectic mix,” Rai recalls, including George Puil, the full-time teacher and Vancouver city councillor who got kids like Rai interested in civic politics.
“It was almost like out of the ’50s, the neighbourhood feel, and how the high school was really part of the neighbourhood,” said Rai. “It was a real ‘Happy Days’ environment.”
LAST QUARTER-CENTURY AND THE FUTURE
If Kits has a Happy Days’ environment, then for the last quartercentury, its answer to Arnold’s Drive-In has been Nat’s New York Pizzeria.
Nat’s, a casual eatery around the corner from the school, is run by cousins Franco (class of ’82) and Natalino (Nat) Bastone (class of ‘78), paternal figures in the neighbourhood who fed pro athletes and Hollywood stars, both before and after they made it big.
Nat pointed to Ryan Reynolds and Joshua Jackson as two Nat’s regulars during their years as Kits students, who “never forgot where they came from” after they became movie stars.
In 2015, when Reynolds returned to Vancouver as one of the biggest names in Hollywood, starring in the title role of the locally shot Deadpool, the superhero flick needed 32 pizzas for props. The pizzas could have been sourced anywhere. But Reynolds made sure they came from Nat’s.
Reynolds lives in New York now, but gets back to the old neighbourhood “all the time,” he said in an email this week.
“Kits always felt so communityfocused. It felt like it embraced its surroundings, which is in the heart of an eclectic and diverse neighbourhood,” Reynolds said. “I love the Greek restaurants and businesses along Broadway. I felt like a member of those families when I’d visit. I still do.
“The neighbourhood has obviously changed a lot . ... Like most neighbourhoods, Kits is a lot more expensive these days. But I love how so much of the character is intact.”
There aren’t as many Greek delis and tavernas along Broadway as there once were. Broadway Bakery, run by the family of Reynolds’s old high school buddy Peter Zerbinos and famed for its spanakopita, has closed. But the neighbourhood still has a special place in the hearts of many Greeks, including Zerbinos, who still lives there.
“I’ll never leave,” Zerbinos said. “I told my wife before we got married. I’ll never leave.”
As the tavernas close on Broadway, change is in the air at Kits High, with the school undergoing a rebuild and adapting to a shiny new building that incorporates the old Gothic, castle-like facade. The old with the new.
The band and theatre programs, recently on the upswing, no longer perform in the old auditorium where Louis Armstrong blew his trumpet, but in a new state-of-the art facility.
Another era ends with this school year, as Don Staller (class of ’76), the latest in that tradition of iconic Kits students-turned-PEteachers, prepares to retire.
Staller was a multi-sport athlete who still holds several school records, a Kits parent whose kid (also an elite athlete) attended the school, and a teacher there for more than 30 years.
Much of a school’s value is outside the classroom, Staller said, in sports, theatre, clubs, community.
“I got a lot out of this school when I was here. I want those kids to have the same,” Staller said. “We’re trying to keep it alive.”