1967 - The Beatles, The Monkees & Twiggy

Hello Everyone - Well, I have a little time so I will write another chapter in my life - eventually I will get to present day but in the meantime, here's a little more history as to how I got where I am today.....





1967 was the year of Twiggy, The Monkees, The Beatles, Expo 67 and the dawning of a new age of crafting.

As a normal, all-Canadian teenager, I was a fanatic about purchasing fashion magazines each month. My favorite was SEVENTEEN, but there was another that ran a close second, it was called TEEN. Anyway, I purchased "17" each and every month religiously. I was babysitting most nights and earning a grand total of .35 per hour so I had plenty of money to indulge in whatever extravagance I could afford. I was also still collecting my .35 a week allowance from my father each Saturday so most days, I felt pretty flush. I was still beading and selling my creations so I had the money from those sales but I continued to look for new ways in which to create. And finally my creative fervor was ignited by one single issue of my favorite magazine - the May, 1967 issue of SEVENTEEN!

In the summer of 1967 my father proposed taking a family holiday - it actually would be the first and last I would ever take with my family. Disneyland or Expo 67? While us kids (there were 3 i my family) chorused DISNEYLAND, my father replied Expo 67. Why? Well, most of our family was located in Windsor, Ontario and he proposed to drive from Vancouver to Montreal and back again. My mother hemmed, my brother hawed, and my sister and I just groaned. In those days there was no mini TV or DVD player to entertain - only the radio and maybe a few games that could be played in the back seat (Peter Pinch was a favorite). And with two parents who enjoyed "the old stuff" in terms of music on the radio, we kids knew it would be a long, boring, journey!

Midway through the road trip, wanting something, anything to read, when my father stopped for gas at a station somewhere in Alberta, I leapt out of the car and ran to see what magazines they had. While the new July issue of SEVENTEEN had not been posted on the newstands, a copy of the May 1967 issue (which had sold out so fast where I lived) just happened to be there. I purchased the issue immediately, ran back to my father's Parisienne convertible and began devouring each and every page. After thumbing through the fashion pages, I came to an article entitled "You Still Can Make Money This Summer" and on the 2 pages allowed for the article I saw that there were talking about CRAFTING items to SELL! And to my amazement, there were OTHER things to create instead of beaded jewelry.

Remember paper flowers? Well, they were there. String jewelry, Plaster of Paris jewelry, button jewelry, there were a lot of crafts pictured that I had not even thought possible. But there they were! All I wanted to do at that point in time was get the car to turn around and get me back home. Since I couldn't do that, the rest of my trip lay in my quest for finding parts. Lots and LOTS of parts!

Expo 67 is a bit of a blur. I remember the family we stayed with in Montreal, a husband, wife and their 2 children. While they spoke fluent French, I had to make do with my broken Grade 8 High School French. Still, I managed to communicate with the family. Expo itself was fabulous - the crowds enormous and the pavilions really something special. I even managed to glimpse Queen Elizabeth II during that time as she was visiting the Fair herself.  I enjoyed each of the 3 days we were there but I must admit I was chomping at the bit to get home.

On our way back from Montreal we spent a few days in Windsor, visiting my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I didn't know I had such a BIG family!

The trip home was uneventful and once there I started experimenting with crafting. I never really came up with anything I really liked but I sure enjoyed what I was doing!

The school term started once again in September 1967 and during that time my parents began to drift apart. They also started to argue. One family crisis led to another and in May 1968, the family was forced to move from our 3 bedroom home in Lynn Valley to a 3 bedroom townhouse on Capilano Road, just below Grouse Mountain and across the way from the Capilano Suspension Bridge.

With a change of schools and new teachers, I really came to love Handsworth Secondary School. It was a fresh change from Argyle where I had been for my junior years and I really felt I was beginning a new chapter in my life. WoW, was I ever!

Handsworth sits almost immediately below Grouse Mountain, the local skiing area for the mainland. It's high up on a mountain but the area is still very rural. Lots of houses, hills and a nice central shopping area for groceries and the like. The air was crisp, clean and clear. Smog was something unheard of at that time.

Orientation at the school was fast and my fondest recollection is the name of my art teacher, Miss Clay. Honestly, I kid you not. Talk about a portent of things to come. Miss Clay was a really wonderful teacher who was learning Mandarin Chinese. At class time there would always be a Chinese newspaper on her desk and it was amazing that this teacher was trying to learn something that looked so hard!

Traditional art? Nope. Miss Clay was NOT for that. While Mr. Crumlin at Argyle (a perfect Scotsman with his thick brogue and bushy red beard) was for the classics, Miss Clay was for the experimental. While painting, drawing, sculpting and pottery were still the norm, Miss Clay ventured further into crafts. Leather tooling, Batik, Candle Making, Mosaics, Macrame, Copper Enameling - honestly, I think I tried every craft at least once by the time senior year came ar0und. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn and Miss Clay was the perfect personification of encouragement.

The summer of 1969 found me renting a space, along with several girlfriends from Handsworth, at a shop on Lonsdale Avenue. Near the end of the street where the Vancouver Ferry once ran, the shop was an early incarnation of Cost Plus or Pier 1 Imports. The bottom floor of the 2-story building was filled with items from every corner of the world, while the upstairs was filled with crafts from any North Vancouverite who wanted to rent. The space was cheap, about $15 a month if I recall correctly, and divided each month by "us girls" meant that I was paying about $3 a month to try to make a little pocket money.  We not only managed to pay the rent on time but actually made a profit. Each girl was responsible for a shift during the weekend when we could be present at the shop. Monday through Friday, the store took care of sales. You can imagine our excitement when we stormed into the shop on Saturday to see how well (or badly) we had done the previous days before. That experience in selling, to this day, remains another memory firmly entrenched in my mind. That was the true beginning, I think, of my understanding of how a business was to be run. Some days I didn't sell anything, some days I sold a lot. But again, the sales only fueled the fire I had to create MORE. To experiment MORE. And again, my life was about to take another change. Maybe it was for the better. Maybe it wasn't. But I'll keep that for my next blog.

Till next time.