(This section of the Mitchell history has been written by Warren Mitchell, one of Gerald and Maureen’s five sons. It reflects his recollections of their life as viewed by an imperfect observer and may, therefore, have any number of errors and omissions. It is obviously necessarily devoid of much detailed information in the early years.)
My parents, Gerald Mitchell and Maureen Orr, met in Qualicum Beach at some point in the 1940’s. Gerald had moved to Qualicum Beach from Victoria with his parents, Nathan and Elfreda Mitchell around the end of the Second World War. Much of Dad’s early days in Qualicum Beach are already captured in Elfreda Mitchell’s autobiography. Mom was already in Qualicum Beach since she had moved there from Revelstoke (?) with her parents David and Mabel Orr.
The Orrs had a two-acre parcel of land about five kilometers to the north of Qualicum Beach. This small farm was situated right along the Island Highway and just south of Texada Road in a community often called Little Qualicum or Dashwood. Mom lived there with her parents and two sisters, Patricia and Beverley and went to school in Qualicum Beach. She also had two brothers, Len and Clifford (usually known as Tip or Tippy) but I am not clear if her brothers actually lived at Little Qualicum for any appreciable period of time.
Gerald and Maureen were married in St. Paul’s Church (Church of England) in Nanaimo, British Columbia, on April 16, 1949, by Reverend N.S. Noel. According to their marriage certificate the witnesses were John K. Stevens and Myrtle E. Hart, but I have no idea who these people were. Essentially immediately after the marriage, the newlyweds moved to Edmonton, Alberta, were Dad continued the house contracting business that he had operated in Qualicum Beach with his father, Nathan, and where their first of five sons, Dennis Richard, was born on November 8, 1949.
Sometime soon thereafter, Mom and Dad moved to Calgary where their second son, Warren Kenneth (me), was born on October 2, 1951. I do not believe that the name Warren had any previous family connection and so have often wondered where my name came from. Their third son, Earle Stewart, was born on February 8, 1953. Since Earle was born on the same day as Dad’s older brother Earle, picking out a name for the baby was probably fairly easy.
The growing family left Calgary at some point after Earle’s birth and moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, presumably as Dad continued to follow post-war building booms and house construction work. Their fourth son, Stephen Morris, was born in Regina on February 19, 1955. Stephen’s middle name of Morris was, of course, Dad’s mother’s maiden name. There followed yet again one more prairie move, this time to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and one more son, Philip Gregory, who was born on April 24, 1956.
Throughout these moves across Alberta and Saskatchewan, Dad’s parents continued to move along with the family as Dad and Grandpa worked together at house construction. At some point on the prairies it appears that Dad began to take much more of the lead in running the construction business while Grandpa continued as a carpenter. In Moose Jaw, Dad joined a larger construction and real estate company called Bloomer-Meickle. In a Moose Jaw Times-Herald newspaper advertisement of the day (February 25, 1956), Dad is referred to as “…one of Canada’s outstanding and proven home builders…” and the story goes on to say that Gerald has “…supervised and constructed every Bloomer-Meikle home built by Bloomer-Meikle men.” Interestingly, the advertisement also lists some of the telephone numbers for this company and they have only four digits in total. The principal of Bloomer-Meikle was Grant Bloomer who, along with his wife Eva, became long-time friends of Mom and Dad.
Mom and Dad built a home on Albert Street in Moose Jaw. This home was directly across the road from a small park, now St. Michael’s School. In the back yard a cabin was built for Grandma and Grandpa since Grandpa was still doing carpentry work with Dad and Grandma was helping Mom raise an undoubtedly unruly gang of five boys. It is at this time that I was beginning to have much more distinct memories of the family’s early days. For example, I remember that Grandma and Mom would take the boys to a local church for services and Sunday School. In the winter there was a snow-covered hill close by the church where the kids would sled and toboggan after the services. Albert Street at the time was also essentially the edge of town and the open prairie was right next door where the boys would go out to pick crocuses for Mom in the spring and hunt gophers throughout the summer. While the crocuses were pretty, they were invariably also full of small ants and so Mom was never really all that excited about having them brought into the house.
In Moose Jaw the older boys were now beginning school. The first school that I can remember was Queen Elizabeth Elementary School where Dennis and I went. I was there for grade 1 and part of grade 2 but once the family moved to Albert Street it was necessary to change schools and so Dennis and I, and now Earle as well, continued our education at Palliser Heights Elementary School. I went to this school for the latter part of grade 2 and the early part of grade 3.
It was now 1959 and Mom and Dad had been on the prairies for approximately ten years. During this time they had moved frequently, accumulated five sons and built an unknown number of houses. Throughout this time, while Dad had his parents close at hand, I believe that Mom had not seen her parents except for one train trip back to Vancouver Island and Qualicum Beach. I assume that Mom took me along and so I met my maternal grandparents for the first time but I have no recollection of the trip. It was also at this time that Grandpa decided to retire from carpentry and so he and Grandma moved back to British Columbia where they settled in Sidney, on Vancouver Island. And so, for whatever other reasons, including that perhaps the building boom had run its course in Moose Jaw, Mom and Dad decided to leave Saskatchewan and move to Victoria, British Columbia. They loaded up our blue Dodge station wagon, the one with the pushbutton drive selectors and the spotlight that Dad had installed, and we drove out to the coast.
We arrived in Victoria sometime just before Christmas, 1959. It is a continuing irritation to me that I have essentially no memory of the trip to the coast as I suspect it was probably pretty interesting to drive from Saskatchewan to Vancouver Island in 1959 with seven people in one car, including five boys where the eldest was only ten years old and the youngest was only three. Our first accommodation in Victoria was at a small motel called the Craigflower Motel on Admirals Road. The Gorge waterway was directly behind our motel room and we watched the herring fishers catch fish off the Admirals Bridge. Just across the bridge was the Craigflower Elementary School where we went for a very brief period.
Before the end of the 1959-1960 school year we moved to a rental house on Shelbourne Avenue and Dennis, Earle and I transferred to Doncaster Elementary School were I finished off grade 3. I recall that this is where I first went to a Cub Pack meeting at a recreation hall just north of our home on Shelbourne Avenue but I don’t recall any interesting things that we might have done at the cub meetings.
For reasons that I suspect no one can now guess at, Dad had decided that he was going to start a new business career in Victoria rather than continue with house construction and therefore he began to build a new Dog ‘N’ Suds drive-in restaurant. He had a partner, Gerry Fysh, who had worked with Dad at Bloomer-Meickle in Moose Jaw. Gerry, his wife Genn, and their three children, Cheryl, Wendy and Raymond, had also left Moose Jaw and were now in Victoria. Mom and Dad moved from Shelbourne Avenue to a new duplex on Effingham Street in Esquimalt and the Fysh’s were next door in the other half of the duplex. A site for the new restaurant was chosen at the northeast quadrant of the Admirals Road and Craigflower Road intersection and construction was begun. Dennis and I were enlisted to help with the building and I remember being on the roof nailing down the tongue and groove planks. Apparently while walking around on the roof I must have stepped on a rotten piece of board because I remember my leg falling through the roof and I had to be pulled up by Dad.
Once the Dog ‘N’ Suds was up and running, it was a source of great fun for me since I remember going with Dad on weekends to help him with the financial books. We would go early in the morning to the office at the back of the restaurant and I would run the adding machine, the old-style one with the hand crank that had to be pulled to enter every set of numbers, while Dad would read out the meal invoice totals. This was usually only after I first went to the front of the restaurant and filled myself a large glass of root beer. My brothers and I also used the window trays from the restaurant as ‘tables’ beside our bunk beds. But unfortunately, overall I am sure that the restaurant was not a financial success in any way since Dad had sold out after only a year or so. The restaurant was torn down before too many years passed and the site became part of the parking lot for the historical site next door and the expanded road intersection beside the new Canadian Tire store that was built across the street decades later. I find this particularly sad since I think that the idea and timing for a drive-in restaurant in Victoria was a good one but I suspect that the site chosen by Dad and Gerry Fysh was simply wrong. As evidence in support of this, at the same time a new A&W drive-in restaurant was also being built on Douglas Street closer to downtown Victoria and this restaurant continues to operate to this day.
While we lived in Esquimalt I went to Lampson Street Elementary School for grade four. This was the year that the school curriculum required students to begin writing and we were allowed to use pens for the first time. Interestingly, the pens we used at that time were the old stick and nib type that required an inkwell for dipping the pen. I still remember having to bring my inkwell bottle up to the teacher to have her fill it with ink. I believe that Dennis and Earle were also going to Lampson, but Stephen and Philip were enrolled at a nearby private school that required them to wear a school uniform every day of grey flannel shorts and a blue blazer with the school crest on it. Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of the school itself.
After Effingham Street, we moved to Baker Street in Saanich. Dad was now back working as an independent contractor building new houses and also designing and draughting the plans necessary for this work. Dad would get up very early in the morning, probably around 4:30 – 5:30 am to do his draughting and design work before he would leave home around 7:30 am to inspect any of the building sites that he had underway. At some point around this time Dad began operating under the company name of Redwood Construction but I do not know if this was a legally formally incorporated company or not. Dad’s business model was fairly straightforward and continued for years; Dad would contract with a prospective new home owner to design their new home, help them work out the financing with a bank or the federal Central Mortgage and Housing Association (CMHA), and then he would function as a general contractor to engage the subtrades necessary to complete the house construction. As the house was being built, Dad would receive a payment for his services at various stages of the construction.
Right across the back fence of the house on Baker Street was Glanford Elementary School where the most of the kids were now going to school. Dennis, however, was in grade 7 and in those days this meant he was now in junior high school so he had to walk to Colquitz Junior Secondary School, a fair distance away from home. I was in grade 5 at Glanford, while Earle was in grade 3 and Stephen was in grade 1.
Just down the street from us on Baker Street lived Mom and Dad’s old friends Charlotte (Char) and Reg Bull and their three children: Laura, Cheryl and Kevin. Mom had gone to school with Char (nee Horsland) in Qualicum Beach and Char and Reg had been close friends with my parents in Calgary where Reg worked at the local dairy. Dad often talked about the times he would visit Reg at work on the day that the dairy cleaned out the ice cream making machinery. When the mechanical churning screws were emptied of leftover ice cream Dad would pull out his spoon and eat all of the ice cream he wanted before it melted and run down the drain.
While we were living on Baker Street, Dad was building a new home for speculation sale (usually referred to as a ‘spec’ house) on Brentview Avenue in Brentwood, just outside of Victoria. So in the fall of 1962 we moved into this house while it was being sold. This meant that all of the kids had to change schools again. Dennis moved to Brentwood Junior Secondary on Keating Cross Road, while Earle, Stephen and myself went to Brentwood Elementary. I imagine that Philip would now also be going to school with us, as he would be in grade 1 at this time.
Brentwood was a great place to live for a gang of boys. Our home was just a couple of blocks up from a very sheltered little cove in Brentwood Bay where we used to play on the beach and build rafts for our ‘ocean-going’ sailing adventures. It seemed like we always had a raft either under construction or in operation. For a time Earle and I kept our raft tied up at the main wharf in Brentwood and we would often take it out into Brentwood Bay, sometimes so far out that we would have to watch out for the ferry that still runs between Brentwood and Mill Bay. Most of the time we were doing things that our parents, especially our Mom, never knew about and this was undoubtedly a good thing.
The house in Brentwood is the first time that I can remember meeting my Grandmother’s brother, Bill Morris. He was in our home for a short while although I have no particular recollection of where he had come from or how long he stayed. But there is no question that he was a memorable fellow who had seen and done a great deal during his life. It is truly unfortunate that he or someone else never fully captured this unusual life in a book.
Our time in Brentwood was quite short-lived as, I presume, the house sold fairly quickly and so we moved back into Victoria to an apartment complex on Newton Avenue. This was a very small apartment for a family of seven but the great thing was that there was a heated indoor swimming pool as part of the complex. This meant that we could go swimming whenever we wanted! For a time, Dennis and I had a job cleaning this pool and so I remember going into the pool and scrubbing the tiles to remove any algae or dirt that might have accumulated. This work was really nothing but fun for a boy of eleven.
It was now 1963-64 and I was in grade 7 at Oaklands Elementary School. Dennis, I think, was at Lansdowne Junior Secondary. I cannot recall exactly where the other boys were but I think Earle was also at Oaklands, while Stephen and Philip were at another school (Richmond Elementary) that was closer to our apartment. This was the year that I got my first set of glasses, after a period of time when it was becoming more and more obvious that I could not see the classroom blackboard any longer. Interestingly, I can also remember the day that President John Kennedy was assassinated since the school principal closed down the school so that we could all go home to be with our parents in case the assassination escalated into some type of war or other calamity.
In the summer of 1964 we moved to a new apartment on Shelley Street, just north of where the Hillside Shopping Mall is now situated. At this time, however, the mall site was just a large open field that I remember flying kites in and walking across on my way to Lansdowne Junior Secondary School where I was in Grade 8 and Dennis was in Grade 10. The three younger kids were, I believe, now going to Doncaster School. The Shelly Street apartment was a five-floor design that was novel for the time, but now has been replicated often. This was also the year that the new skateboarding craze began. I know now that you can see a skateboard anywhere, and there are even stores completed focused on it…but back then it was brand new. So new, in fact, that you couldn’t even buy a skateboard, rather, you had to make one yourself. And the wheels were nothing like the incredible nylon wheels of today. In those days you had to take apart an old pair of roller skates to salvage the wheels that you would then attach to whatever piece of wood you were going to use as a board. As I recall, Dennis made a very fancy skateboard in school woodworking class out of satin walnut wood that worked incredibly well. My first skateboard, however, was made out of a piece of plywood that didn’t work quite so well but it was still perfectly functional. One of the really exciting things about these home-built skateboards was that the salvaged wheels in those days were made out of some type of composite metal that worked just fine on the roller skates that they were designed for since you couldn’t go very fast. But when the same wheels were used on fast skateboards you had to be cautious because the speed could cause the wheels to overheat and when this happened it was not uncommon to have the composite metal suddenly collapse and fall apart under you. This usually led to a sudden, abrupt and potentially painful stop on the pavement.
It was at some point around now, I believe, that Dad entered a business relationship with Kasapi Construction in Victoria. Dad did the house design and draughting of building plans for this company. I don’t believe that this was particularly profitable or enjoyable for Dad since I seem to recall that he often seemed agitated about some issue or other in regard to the relationship.
In 1965 Dad had built a new home on Albany Street that had not yet sold so once again we moved and the kids changed schools. Dennis was now entering Victoria High School for Grade 11; I was going to S. J. Willis Junior Secondary School for Grade 9, while Earle, Stephen and Philip were at Burnside Elementary for Grades 7, 5 and 4, respectively. This meant we kids were pretty well scattered across Victoria, especially since we all used to walk or take a bus to school. The walking wasn’t exactly the ‘…3 miles uphill each way, in a snowstorm…’ of our ancestors but some rainy days it was a chore nonetheless. It seems it was around now that Mom began to attend the Pythian Sisters Lodge in Sidney with Grandma. I think that this was a real break for Mom from the struggles of her regular day since it allowed her to get out of the house and focus on something entirely different than her family needs. In a relatively short period Mom took on positions of increasing leadership within the Lodge until finally she was the head. During this period our Grandpa was beginning to fail physically and so I remember that I would sometimes accompany Mom to Sidney where I would sit for the evening with Grandpa while Mom and Grandma attended their Lodge.
Before the end of the 1965-66 school year the Albany Street house sold and so we moved to the Burnside Road apartments near the Island Highway. Again we had to cram a family of seven into a two-bedroom apartment. While this was a tight squeeze, the good news was that we did get access to a swimming pool again; except this one was outside and so we didn’t use it very much. And the commute to our various schools was considerably longer for all of us. Today, this apartment complex sits across from the Tillicum Mall but in those days this site was again essentially an open field with one exception- there was a drive-in movie theatre across Burnside Road and we could see the screen from our apartment. So we could watch a movie sometimes but really the screen was so far away that it really didn’t make for very enjoyable viewing. For any younger readers who don’t know what a drive-in movie is, you should ask your grandparents about these fabulous components of teenage life in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
It must have been some time around now when Dad began a business relationship with a fellow named Barry Jones. This was a variation on the earlier home construction theme where now Dad had designed a new, standard format three-bedroom home that could be replicated any number of times. It was no longer a specific original design for an individual homeowner. With Barry Jones as the salesperson, Dad supervised the construction of this home in many places across Victoria. Back then, you could always identify these homes because of the standard look and the distinctive ‘gingerbread’ fascia boards that Dad installed on all of them. These homes were built ‘on spec’ and then sold after they had been completed. One example of these homes can be found on Dunsterville Street in Saanich, which is memorable to me because my brother Earle and I put in the perimeter drainage tile and septic tank and field for the house.
As an aside, it was about this time that Dad’s brother Howard, with his sons David and John, was renovating a house on the Patricia Bay Highway just north of the Saanich City Hall and Warren was helping out. One of the tasks was to clean up the yard of a large pile of garbage under some blackberry bushes. It was here that Warren found an old ceramic ginger beer bottle made by ‘Thorpe & Co Ltd Victoria’. This bottle remains in Warren’s possession to this day.
In the summer of 1966 the family moved again- this time to 1297 Derby Road in Saanich. While this was again a rental house, it was one that the family stayed in for five years until 1971, a very long time by our family standards. It was undoubtedly the home that I remember best and liked the most. It was next to the Cedar Hill Golf Course and this gave all of us boys a great place to play. While we certainly tried to golf once in awhile, perhaps we used the course more to collect fallen acorns from the many Garry Oak trees on the course and then had ‘acorn fights’, similar to snowball fights but with a somewhat harder, albeit smaller, projectile. Much about this house sticks in my mind, including the telephone number we had there- 383-8813, or EVergreen 3-8813, since in those days of relatively few telephones it was common practice to use an alphabetic identifier at the beginning of a number. Dad continued to build houses as the family underwent a period of change. Dennis graduated from Victoria High School in 1967 and left home soon afterwards. I graduated from Mt. Douglas Senior Secondary in 1969, spent a year working full-time with Dad and then went back to school at the University of Victoria. Earle also graduated from Mt. Douglas in 1971, while Stephen and Philip went to Reynolds Junior Secondary School.
It was during our time on Derby Road that Dad’s health and stamina began to fail, most probably as a result of a brain tumor. It was in later 1969 or early 1970, I think, when I was driving by one of the houses that Dad was building in the Phelps Subdivision, near Thetis Lake Park, when I saw Dad’s car. Dad had stopped to do an inspection of the work but had suffered some type of episode that caused him to black out and fall off the front steps into the excavation against the house foundation. Somehow in the fall, Dad must have hit the outside water faucet because when I found him the tap was on and Dad was soaking wet. The result was that Dad required an operation to remove the tumor but I must say that I remember very little about this because Mom and Dad seemed to be very tight-lipped about what was going on at the time. One thing I do remember is that during the actual operation Mom and Aunt Olive were together when the hospital called to say that Dad had survived. I still remember Mom crying upon hearing the good news.
Some other general bits of scattered memory from Derby Road include the fact that this was the time that Dad’s Dodge station wagon, the car that brought us out from Saskatchewan, finally gave up the ghost. Dad had given the car to me and I tried to fix it up but frankly I had little or no aptitude or interest in car mechanics and so I was completely unsuccessful in getting the car back into operation. Besides, I had bought a Datsun truck and camper at this time so had little interest in working on another car. Dennis also had a car but I cannot remember exactly what it was. I do know that he had much more of an interest and aptitude for cars than I did and spent a number of years working on and racing cars. Dad had a white Ford truck that he used to take us kids out to Thetis Lake for swimming. In those days, we simply all loaded up in the truck box, sometimes with folding chairs as seats, and drove to the lake. There were no such things as seatbelts or restrictions on riding in an open box. We also had a beige Ford Fury sedan but that wasn’t as much fun to ride around in.
During the summer of 1971, after my first year of university, our cousin David Mitchell and I were working in Port Hardy helping to build a fence around the airport when I got sick and needed to hitchhike back to Victoria to see a doctor. I was in the back of a truck while driving past Little Qualicum, looked out at Grandpa Orr’s place to see how it was doing, and saw Mom and Dad’s car in the driveway. I asked the driver to stop and got out since it was obvious that Mom and Dad were up in Qualicum Beach for what I thought was a visit. When I went into the house I was stunned to see that all of our furniture was there and set up. While I had been away from home for the summer Mom and Dad had made a decision to leave Victoria and move permanently to Mom’s childhood home that had been empty for a while. Dennis and Earle had remained in Victoria since they were both working; Stephen and Philip had moved with Mom and Dad and would continue their schooling at Qualicum Beach Secondary School. Although I think Mom and Dad disputed this, both Dennis and I believe to this day that the move was made without telling either of us beforehand. Maybe they didn’t want us to know, or maybe they simply weren’t able to tell us since we were both living away from Derby Road at the time, but I still think about what might have happened if I had not seen their car in Qualicum Beach as I was coming down to Victoria. Undoubtedly I would have walked into the Derby Road house unannounced and found it either empty or inhabited by another family. Either way, it would have been quite a shock.
So now Mom and Dad had come full circle in their lives- they were back in Qualicum Beach where they had met as kids, and now living in Mom’s parent’s house. Just to add spice to their lives they allowed Stephen and Philip to stock the property with rabbits, chickens, a cow and a goat named Sir Dudley. That goat was a continuous source of frustration since it wouldn’t stay behind fences and would escape and wander around the neighbourhood. It also had a nasty habit of butting anyone who was nearby and not watching it closely. The cow was more docile but it too would periodically break out and have to be rounded up again.
At some point around 1972 Earle moved up from Victoria to Qualicum Beach as well. He started working full time in construction and has continued to live and work there to this day.
During the mid-1970’s Dad developed the back half of the homestead property by building a fourplex apartment. Earle, Stephen and Philip helped with the construction but Dennis and I were in Victoria and so really weren’t part of this work. The apartment building is still there but the property was sold at some point around then.
During the 1970’s ‘the boys’ began to move on with their independent life. Dennis and I were in Victoria; he was working at draughting and I was going to the University of Victoria taking a degree in Biology. Earle was now firmly established in Qualicum Beach working in construction. Stephen and Philip were still living in Qualicum Beach but they were usually working either in Parksville or Nanaimo in various positions in the restaurant business. Dennis married Patricia Cunningham on August 4, 1973, in Victoria. I married Sherry Mitchell on August 31, 1973, in her parent’s garden on Rye Road in Qualicum Beach. Earle married Madeleine Tessier on ?? at French Creek. Stephen and Philip had by now moved away with Stephen going to Nanaimo for a period before he moved to Vancouver. Philip left Qualicum and went directly over to Vancouver, I believe.
It was around this time that Mom and Dad, having sold the Orr property, began to live with Earle and Maddie.
Mitchell Family History 