Every Friday Norm Barr blocks off time for his ROMEO club.
It is the weekly Really-Old-Men-Eating-Out club, the 85-year-old explains with a chuckle – the one afternoon a week he gets together with other longtime Squamish residents and enjoys a bite to eat, great conversation and a laugh or two. A few minutes with Barr and his cheeky sense of humour shines through.
The Chief sat down with Barr for a conversation that was peppered with laughs about his and Squamish’s past and present. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Q: So tell me about your upbringing?
A: My parents moved to Parkhurst on Green Lake in Whistler in 1926 and built a big saw mill and logging camp. In 1929, the Depression came along and they couldn’t sell their lumber for enough to pay the freight and the bank manager foreclosed on them. I was born in 1932. I was an only child – a one-off. We stayed until 1938 and then the mill burned down; it was hit with that dust spontaneous combustion. That’s when the family moved to Squamish.
Q: What is your earliest memory of Squamish?
A: We came in 1938 and there were under 1,000 people. I was six years old and I had never been in a place where there was more than one or two kids and I went to school at the old Mashiter School – and I was afraid to go in. There were about 90 kids in the entire school from Grades 1 to 12. I didn’t go the first day. I turned around and went home and told my mom the school door was locked. The next day she took me so I had no excuses left and had to go in.
Q: What was your first job?
A: In that era most of us had jobs after school and on Saturdays. My first job was working with my dad because he had a welding, machine and blacksmith shop on Cleveland Avenue. After I graduated in 1950 – we were the last class to graduate out of that Mashiter School – I worked for my dad still and then when I turned 19, I went to Vancouver to vocational school taking welding training.
My dad always told me, “You don’t want to work for anybody unless you absolutely have to and don’t rent nothing because you aren’t going to get any gains from it.”
Q: That was before the highway was put in, so did Vancouver seem a long way away?
A: We went by boat. There was no train. From here, the boat ride on the Union Steamships was at least five hours to get to downtown Vancouver. I had to stay overnight.
Q: You have lived in Squamish through all the ups and downs over the years. What has kept you here?
A: I like Squamish and I grew up here. And I always wanted to get into the logging business and because of my knowledge of repairing logging equipment and making stuff, I could do about anything they needed of me. My two friends and I started the CRB Logging Company in 1953. I am the B in the name.
Q: How did you meet your wife, Doreen?
A: She was from Vancouver. She was Al McIntosh’s sister. Doreen McIntosh was her name then. She came up to visit Al in about 1956. We were married in 1958. We got married in Vancouver, it was a quiet wedding; They cost too much money and we were both broke.
Q: Do you remember how much your first house cost you?
A: Yes, $10,500. It was on Fourth Avenue and Victoria Street in downtown Squamish, and it is still there. That was quite a popular area then. There was that and Dentville. The thing is then you couldn’t get a mortgage in Squamish. No banks would give mortgages here because there was no sewer, no water, no infrastructure. You had to get a demand loan, which was OK, but that meant you had to get more of a down payment.
Q: What did you do for fun?
A: We had a cabin at Alta Lake in Whistler for years and we used to water-ski and swim. I liked all that sort of stuff. We used to fish and hunt. We played softball and basketball.
Q: What do you think of how much Squamish has grown?
A: It is progress and that is good in some ways, but it leaves behind a lot of the old lifestyle that was here. When I was younger and working, the town did more as a community. We contributed as individuals. I was on council for six years. A lot of that Pat Brennan era is still important to Squamish. He was a very productive mayor (1969 to 1974). And that council was pretty organized and we had a lot of knowledgeable people and we didn’t have an engineer or anything on staff. We would get these projects and then when we were about to start we would bring in an engineer consultant. They didn’t have a District staff, really.
I was frustrated with politics, though. It took so long to do things. I was a small business guy and I would sit down with my partner and if we couldn’t figure out something quick, there was something wrong with us.
