'We just went on and on': Love, play, war, and a century of living

The first thing I notice about Vic and Jean Arnold’s home are the chairs. Two living room chairs: one soft pink and high-backed, low to the ground for easy access; the other deep brown and plush, with an electric mechanism to raise and lower the seat.

I’ve never seen them before, but the chairs feel familiar. They, and the bowl of Werther’s Originals on the table, are a sign that I will get exactly what I have come here for: stories of “the olden days” from two people who were there to see them.

Vic turns off the television—a news station covering the American election—and slowly gets out of the brown chair to greet me. Shoulders hunched, he shuffles across the room to shake my hand. Jean emerges from the bedroom a moment later, pausing to pepper her comparatively young friend Dave Dayton with pleasant inquiries.

In August, Dave—a friendly bridge competitor of the Arnolds—had emailed a picture of the couple to The Current. Jean had just turned 100 years old. Her husband had recently celebrated his 101st birthday. And together, the couple will celebrate their 75th wedding anniversary next summer.

I knew I needed to meet them.

With Dave’s help, we arranged a time to meet and chat about the events and changes they, and Abbotsford, have seen over a century of living.

This story is ordered like the interview itself, a meandering journey through memory and time.

Early Abbotsford and early love

“At that time, it wasn't even a village,” Vic begins, starting with his birth in August 1923. (The Village of Abbotsford was incorporated the following year.) “Not many babies were born in Abbotsford at the time; there was only about 15 or 20 families in that area.”

Vic was born into what would become a large family—he was the second of seven children. Jean was born in Mair, a tiny Saskatchewan hamlet near the Manitoba border. She wouldn’t come to Abbotsford until 1947, when she followed her brother who had started work at a grocery store.

Vic would have been in his mid-20s when he met the woman with whom he would spend the next seven decades.

“At that time, I worked at a funeral home,” Vic says. “Then next to the funeral home was a little store, a little country store.”

“And I was working in the store there,” Jean interrupts.

“The building’s not there now,” Vic continues. “Her brother had this little store, and she came out to stay with him for a while, and she worked in the store. And I used to go across there and get chocolate bars or cigarettes or something. And she had to be there.

“A couple of us were going to go to the PNE, I think it was. I asked her if she’d like to go. And she said, ‘Sure.’ So that was the start of it.”

Jean chimes in: “I remember the first thing we did, we went for a walk,” she says. “Remember that?”

They don’t remember any other details from the day—but with driving speeds limited to 80km/h on the old highway, Vic remembers it being a long drive to the PNE in those days.

Back to early Abbotsford

“The mill that closed down in ’39 … The railway used to run from the mill down behind our house and the store. It crossed over a creek,” Vic says. “It came from Mill Lake and came down and crossed a big gully there.

“We used to play on the trestle where the Great Northern Railway used to run across there.

“Sumas Prairie was still a swamp at that time. Lots of mosquitoes in the spring.”

When the mill closed down, it changed the economic activity in Abbotsford, Vic says. People lost their jobs, and began to move away. “There was no employment there for a number of years.”

Mill Lake was what everyone called the lake back then—and still do to this day. Vic remembers playing on the logs floating in the water.

“We used to go up there and play around on the logs on the weekend, and try to drown ourselves,” he says. “Luckily never drowned. Jumped from log to log.”

“Downtown, on Riverside Road, there was a marshalling yard for the logs,” he continues. “The train from the middle of the lake came down there and would leave the cars of logs to get picked up by another train.”

That railroad and others played a central role in the town.

“Kilgard bricks, they had a railway running into there. And of course the train from Sumas … CN used to go through Matsqui, and there was a railway from the Kilgard plant. So we had lots of fun up there on the railway.”

Jumping on logs wasn’t the only entertainment option for Vic and his friends as they grew up.

“We had a lacrosse box there. All the boys played lacrosse. And there was a ball park—it’s not there now,” he says. “The fairgrounds, that big building caught fire when I was eight to 10 years old. It caught fire and burned right to the ground.

“Our house was just across the road from them, and sparks were flying over. I had to keep an eye on the roof or it would catch fire. It was a cedar-shingled roof.”

There wasn’t too much activity at that time, Vic says about his childhood. It was only after the war that things started to pick up.

“Part of it was just trying to make your living. People worked. Walked back and forth to work.”

A blacksmith shop and a flood

Much of the transportation in Abbotsford was undertaken by horse in the early days: “lots of horses, lots of wagons,” Vic says. A stable and a blacksmith shop occupied the prestigious Essendene Avenue corner lot now home to Hub Motor Service.

“There were three blacksmith shops,” Vic says. “The blacksmith shop over the creek had a hole in the floor, and that’s how he cooled his stuff—horseshoes and stuff like that. I used to get a kick out of watching the steam come up.

“It was quite a lively creek, but it’s not there now. It’s all underground.”

Jean speaks again. “My brother had his first store there.”

Her brother worked in groceries and moved to BC first. A year after their mother died, Jean—then Jean Baker—moved to Abbotsford to join him. Not long after Jean arrived, and likely right around the time she met Vic, the 1948 flood tore through the Fraser Valley, inundating Matsqui.

“I used to run an ambulance during the flood,” Vic says. “I took sandwiches up. They had a woman who set up a shop … and used to make sandwiches. We would load them up and deliver them to the people on the dikes.

“Clayburn, the store was still operating during the flood. That was a turning point for them.”

The hospital move

The conversations lulls, and Dave, who is still sitting on the floral love seat near Jean, speaks to keep the momentum going.

“In the archives at The Reach, they have a lot of photographs from then—including your picture, moving people from Cottage Hospital to the new hospital,” he says.

“What year was that?” Jean asks.

It was February 1953—when the new MSA Hospital opened with 50 beds and 18 bassinets. The facility was a significant upgrade from the old Cottage Hospital, which had opened in 1922 and only had 18 beds.

Vic and Jack Kampf, his co-worker at the funeral home, were among those tasked with moving the patients to the new hospital. Dave’s aunt, Fern Lilies, was the matron of the hospital at the time.

A lifetime of work

In preparation for our interview, I searched the newspaper archives about Vic and Jean. I found two advertisements: one highlighted a much younger Vic as an employee of the Henderson’s Funeral Home—which is still running today; the other, from 1960, advertised his services as a used car salesman.

“That was after I quit the funeral home,” he explains. “I went to do some bookwork for John McGowan first. Then I decided I’d try my hand at selling and I sold cars there for another year, I guess two and a half years. And then I went down, I quit, and then I thought, ‘I gotta get something going here.’ So I went and talked to Bill Green, and he says ‘Come and work for me.’ So I worked for him for another year and a half.

“And then I got into Westcoast Transmission, that’s a natural gas company.”

He did “technical work,” calibrating instruments and other related jobs. Today, Westcoast Transmission is called Westcoast Energy, and a part of the Enbridge Pipeline.

“It was small at that time, so I started studying and grew with the business,” he says. “We used to work for the government, with government inspections because we were wholesale, going into Langley and Vancouver and New Westminster to industrial places to calibrate their meters, check them twice a year.”

The visits could lead to some interesting moments—and occasionally extra work.

“We're in Oakalla Prison [in Burnaby], and we're going around back behind the kitchen to take a shortcut to where the meters were, and just by the kitchen window come a bunch of potatoes, all peeled. There was hollering going on. We had to go out and pick them all up.”

(Vic was presumably collecting potatoes, not convicts.)

The Second World War

Like many men who lived through the middle decades of the 20th century, the Second World War featured prominently in Vic’s journey to adulthood. Vic would have just turned 16 when war broke out in Europe. As the war continued, and as Vic neared his 18th birthday, the prospect of conflict loomed increasingly large. Eventually, he became a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force, and travelled to Great Britain to help repair aircraft there.

“I had just turned 18 and they were talking about conscription. I didn’t think I wanted to go in the army, so I went in,” Vic says. ‘I had connections in Vancouver with the group who was doing the recruiting. So I went and talked to him, and he says, ‘You’re not quite 18.’ And I said, ‘I will be in about two weeks.’

“They wouldn’t accept that, so they said, ‘Do the basics now and then come in when you’re 18 and we’ll finish and swear you in.’

“I was part of the Battle of Britain. They were sure Germany was going to launch a landing and go to England. So we went over. There was a bunch of us. It took us 11 days to go over, three days to come home, on the same boat.

“Then we had the bombers. My job was to check and make sure they were viable to do a sortie. Then when they came back we’d have to check them for damage and repairs before the next flight. I did that for six months, always at nighttime, working late.”

“After the war is over, they're gonna go to Japan, fight Japan. They were getting a bunch of guys together to take some more training and modify some aircraft,” he continues. “Everybody was out there celebrating VE Day. We were trying to get these planes ready to go as fast as we could, and by that time, the war was over, they dropped the big bomb on Hiroshima. So I never got there.”

The secret to a long life and marriage

Vic has been talking steady for about half an hour now, and I don’t want to overstay my welcome. It’s time to find out the answers everyone wants from people who have lived to a ripe age: the secrets to a long and happy life.

Vic responds right away.

“Activity. You’re always doing something,” he says. “You do your daily work, you go home, you live in your house, remodel it, get a garden going, enjoy something. We did sports, softball I guess it was. I didn’t play, I used to practice with them. And then in the games I would keep the score. What else did we do? Played horseshoes the rest of the time.

“Mostly work. I would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and deliver newspapers—at that time I was 10 years old,” he continues. “That was the Morning Herald. At 5 o’clock I would meet the train. Sometimes it would be late and I would be late to school. I was in trouble, going ‘This is why I’m late.’

“My brother and I both had a paper route after school. He had the Sun and I had the Province.”

Vic rode his bike on his paper route, and he would “get a flat tire just about every once in a while.”

“I tried to ride my bike between the stones,” he says. “I had about 50 customers.”

Jean says she can’t think of anything specific to credit her long life to: “We just went on and on,” she says.

“Keep busy and don’t worry about anything,” Vic adds.

Their advice for young couples is similar: just keep going.

“Don’t argue with your wife too much, just walk away,” Vic says. “We haven’t had many arguments I don’t think.”

The final stories

With a few minutes left before I feel I should take my leave, I ask Vic and Jean if they have any final stories they want to share about their lives in Abbotsford. Vic mentions that his family was “quite religious.”

“When I left for the Air Force, when I was 17, I heard some conversation from the church people—they were trying to groom me to be a minister,” he says. “I thought, there’s no way I’m going to be a minister. So I went and joined up. Didn’t tell anybody, just hitchhiked into Vancouver. When I came back I said ‘I joined up and I’ll be leaving in two weeks.’

“My mother says, ‘We’ll see about that.’ And I said, ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. I have signed up.’ I just couldn’t see myself as a minister.

“The church was on our property,” he continues. “It had three lots, and our house cut through two lots. I guess when they formed the church in 1922/23, we donated the property and we used to get together on the weekends and build this church. The other one across the road was the United Church.”

The conversation shifts to more working memories, during Vic’s time as a schoolboy, working on the weekends at the grocery.

“When I was going to school, I used to work on the weekends with ... the manager for Safeway at that time,” he says. “It was only a small store by the size of this room here, but it was stuffed. Saturday night was a big night. The store stayed open. People would come in. I was carrying sacks of flour on my shoulder, up the street to the car or their horse and buggy, whatever one they had. I had a 49-pound sack on one shoulder, and a 49-pound sack of sugar on my other shoulder.”

Vic worked many part-time jobs during school, and saw many near mishaps—including one time his manager nearly tripped into a pile of manure while carrying an unwrapped grocery item. He tried working on a chicken farm for three months, and did various other jobs throughout the community before moving to work in a grocery store.

“Never asked for a raise,” Vic says. “We never discussed wages. I made 15 cents an hour. After the war, he asked if I would come work for them again. At that time we had to use stamps. And me, I couldn’t figure that thing out, how that worked.

“He kept working in the store with me, and kept telling me ‘Come stay with me, stay with me. Be a manager.’ I said, ‘I don’t think I want to work in a grocery store.’ That’s when I went to Henderson’s [Funeral Home].”

The end

We reached the end of our interview, and it is time to gather one last photo before I take my leave. Jean, who had been quiet during most of our conservations, takes control to bring Vic to her chair for the picture. She tells Dave, who is lingering to the side, that he needs to be in the image too.

He obliges, reluctantly.

Most of the Arnolds’ friends and family have passed, except for Dave and a couple others. Dave, a youthful 77, notes that he isn’t planning to go for a while yet. There is still bridge for them to play together, and celebrations of the present, the past, and the future to enjoy.