As 1950 rolled up on the calendar, Prince George was turning 35-years-old. The young city struggled to obtain and maintain services necessary to growth and development and to improve residents' quality of life. This is a glimpse of what it was like.
-- Residents banded together in 1953 to form the South Fort George Improvement District. Their aim was to get running water in their homes. The anticipated cost of installing a water system was $150,000 which could be borrowed under the Provincial Irrigation and Loan Act.
-- Before bylaw regulations prevented it, even city families kept chickens. Romantic thoughts conjure images of free-range hens in the yard, hearing their contented clucking and being able to stroll to the nests to collect fresh eggs. However, the birds - especially the roosters - could be dangerous. A two-year old child sustained deep head wounds when a berserk rooster attacked him as he played in his yard.
-- Hollywood film companies began to arrive in Prince George to scout locations and film movies. Although all the specialized work was done by Americans flown in from California, Prince George residents got work as extras and there was also call for the services of local carpenters and river boat pilots. One film called for shots of old-fashioned river freight scows and the company put out a call for boat builders who would know how to replicate one.
--City residents prepared to take their complaints about unsatisfactory telephone service to the Public Utilities Commission. Served in the early 1950s by Northwest Telephone Company, residential customers were upset that the only service forthcoming from the company was adding more telephones to the already overloaded network. Business customers pointed out that "firms competing against each other in business are actually on the same party line and can eavesdrop on each other's conversations."
-- Freight rates for farm produce was appealed on the grounds that they were set twenty years earlier and were out of date. The CNR charged more to ship produce from the central interior to the port of Prince Rupert than they did to ship the same products there from Edmonton - an extra 345 miles away. The discrepancy was not only unfair; it seriously hampered district farmers' ability to market their crops.
-- City council considered rezoning both sides of Victoria Street at the west exit of the city to allow more motels to be built. Ald. Carrie Jane Gray stood apart from her colleagues and opposed the zoning change. Basing her opinion on the experience of having motels in the vicinity of her own home, Mrs. Gray informed council that she "did not believe motels are desirable developments in residential areas."
-- The Prince George and District Hospital struggled with a budget cut right at the time it faced paying wage increases. The result, according to board chairman Frank Clark, was that the hospital "will be colder, darker, dirtier and its patients will get less to eat in 1953."
This column originally ran in The Citizen on Oct. 6, 1999.
