The stereotypes live on, impervious to change.
In its 2016 rankings of the best cities to work in B.C. for 2016, B.C. Business magazine ranks Prince George 19th out of 36. The accompanying photo is a snowy winter scene, shot from Cottonwood Island Park across the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers, showing massive billows of ominous-looking emissions rising high into the air from the Husky refinery and the Canfor Pulp operations. Everywhere else on the list got scenic landscapes, bustling downtowns or impressive aerials to depict their cities.
That's just the latest in a long line of dirty, crime-infested mill town depictions of Prince George, going back decades.
Prince George is "a lusty brat," wrote Allan Fotheringham in a dispatch to the Vancouver Sun in 1964.
He wasn't the legendary Canadian journalist
Dr. Foth yet, but he was 32 the summer the Sun sent him on a tour of B.C. His Prince George story, published on page 3 in the Saturday, July 25 edition, starts with a visit to the beleaguered local judge, who explains under the caption "Drunks Keep Courts Busy" how he has to hold court on evenings and Saturdays to keep up with the "sundry, mischievous doings." An RCMP staff sergeant then talks about how hectic each day is for local police officers and the shock they face, not when they arrive, but when they transfer out.
"They get to think the crime activity here is the normal situation," Fotheringham is told. "They don't know what to do with themselves when they go to an ordinary town."
Comments from a local pastor confirms Prince George's roughneck depiction.
"It's a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah," thunders Pentecostal minister Arthur Townsend to the no-doubt nodding and scribbling in delight Fotheringham. "Its main street (is) a pig pen that has not been cleaned out for years."
Foth confirms that observation with his own personal aside.
"This reporter, representative of a notoriously scruffy profession, was flattered by being approached by a wobbling panhandler without 10 minutes of setting foot upon sidewalk here."
The hard-drinking Prince George profile starts with the headline on Foth's story - "She Weans on a Wallop of Whisky" with the sub-headline reading: "Prince George - Wealth and a Wild Way."
The colourful descriptions of Prince George abound.
The city's high birth rate may be attributable to no TV, long, cold winters and a young population with a 120-100 male-female ratio.
Under the caption "Death Often Comes Quickly," Foth explains how 80 per cent of the deaths in the under-50 Prince George population the year before were from either violence or accidents.
It's not all negative.
Much of the article is a rave about the "new Edmonton" and all of the jobs and growth going on. Yes, the cops hauled in 120 drunks and 10 vagrants during a recent weekend and the railway is bringing in the unemployed drifters by the carload, but the local hospital is cranking out 100 new babies a month.
And Fotheringham was surprised by what he found once he got out of downtown Prince George.
"All of this is in sharp contrast to the suburbia-and-service-club nature of the settle Prince George residents," he wrote. "The residential sections are just as attractive as the main street atmosphere is unsavory."
Fotheringham has nothing but praise for the "irrepressible" Harry Boyle, the "maverick voice" serving as the editor of Prince George's "lively, complaining daily paper." The Citizen, Foth explains, "is famous or condemned - depending upon your point of view locally - for its fiery, unrelenting attacks upon Social Credit."
More than 50 years later, both Vancouver and Prince George have gone through enormous change. Vancouver became a world city with a cosmopolitan population living in million-dollar homes. Prince George didn't become the new Edmonton but it did evolve from its hard-living early days into a bustling regional hub home to one of the best universities in Canada, a top-notch community college, an international airport, one-of-a-kind sports and recreation facilities and a regional cancer centre.
"Ask any woman so unfortunate as to walk down Prince George's main throughfare any evening after dark. It is unlikely she actually will be harmed, but she will get the distinct feeling of being suddenly transported into a brawling frontier town of the Old West."
Fotheringham wrote those words nearly 52 years ago. Sadly, that Lower Mainland one-dimension misconception of Prince George continues to this day.
