When Lorraine Knight was a young girl in Prince George, there were wooden sidewalks and if her sharp eyes spotted a glint of silver below, it was the work of seconds to pry up a plank and retrieve the treasure, if she had a hammer. You could buy a lot with a nickel back then!
Upon graduating from high school, Lorraine won a scholarship for Normal School and headed for Vancouver for teacher training. When she returned, she went to work at Seymour School, now Ecole Franco-Nord. A little later she took enough time to go to UBC for her librarian’s certificate. There were few school libraries at that time, so she got to be a leader in creating those programs. They were ordering their books and figuring out how to teach their students everything a library represents. Lorraine never put a book on the shelf that she had not already read.
“The library programs we started in Prince George were important. We really worked hard with the children creating these programs. There had not been anything like them before.” Lorraine recalled. “The principal used to ask me every day, ‘What are you doing?’ and I would invite him to sit in on my class to see what the children were learning. Librarians were the leaders then.”
In Grades 1 to 3, they would bring the children in and show them the books and let them take some home to read. In Grades 4 through 7, they taught their students how to research a topic, find the facts and put it together in a story or report. No cutting and pasting allowed! That was where Lorraine learned to be a research specialist. Inspiring her students to keep learning pushed her, too.
And then she gave it all up for five years to go sailing with her husband and youngest son. They went all the way down the west coast to Costa Rica. Lorraine had to learn to sail a boat and be a skipper. She was the designated lifeguard for the boat, so she earned all her swimming certificates, took first aid training, and learned to scuba dive.
“When I took my scuba diving course the guy, kept calling me Mrs. Knight. I finally said, ‘For god’s sake call me Lorraine!’ I was so buoyant I kept floating up to the top. They had to put lots of ballast on me to hold me under!”
The Knights sold everything except their house, which they kept and one of the older sons lived there. Their daughter was married and working, while the other son was in university. The rest of the family went sailing. They bought a 48-foot ketch, arranged for correspondence courses for the son coming with them, and set off on a five-year adventure.
“I think that was when I really grew up. We had no ocean around us in Prince George, so I had to adapt to that.” Lorraine remembered. “When I made bread on the boat and it was so hot, they said, ‘what do you think you are doing? Just sit on the curb and eat from the Mexicans.’”
After reaching Costa Rica, Lorraine says they enjoyed the best key lime pie in the world before returning to Prince George. And no, she won’t tell me if she even has the recipe! When sailing was done, Lorraine resumed work with School District 57 as a librarian on call and got ready for the next adventure.
Lorraine says she liked to ski fast. When her children were growing up, they started at Tabor Mountain. Like her, their sons loved skiing fast. When they started racing, it was quickly apparent that the runs at Tabor were not going to be long enough, so they got together with other parents and investors to start the development at Purden Ski Hill.
Now at 80, her love of skiing and research inspired her to write a book called First Tracks, all about the history of skiing in and around Prince George. Lorraine continues to stay active, writing poetry and painting with watercolors, although she tells me her daughter is the true artist. She loves staying active and finding new challenges.
