"Nostalgia" By Dan Propp - Jewish Seniors Alliance

I still ‘shutter’ at all the negatives and prints one captured during the non-digital last years of the past millennium. One rainy, nostalgic Greater Vancouver day recently, I was going through stacks of 4 by 6 colour glossies when, what should I uncover? A snap of a B.C license plate, “Beautiful ‘OI-VEY”, 1989!

The 1980’s seem like yesterday. We were still spring chickens. Without being overly ‘provincial’, that image, upon reflection, became a ‘vehicle’, indeed a type of ‘poetic license’ to turn the speedometer back, just a ‘bistle’ to those archaic Vancouver days.

In the 1980’s there still prevailed amazement and excitement watching colour TV and playing Pac-Man on a Commodore green screen computer.

A net was for either fishing or playing at the Q.E. or Kitsalino tennis courts. Delightful demolition fences on 41st and King Edward Ave. were nonexistent. The only big time colourful developers that I recall were found at commercial photo labs such as Mortifee, Munshaw or Williams Bros. Photo Finishing. A few of us black and white dinosaurs, still immersed ourselves in Kodak Dektol or Microdol –X developers in our home made darkrooms, often a temporarily converted washroom.

So, whatever happened to Woodwards, Eatons, the old Krak-A-Joke Shop on Granville, ‘etc., etc., etc.,’ as Yul Brynner pondered in The King and I.

The following home cooked song lyrics may evoke further Vancouver recollections: “It’s just fifteen cents to take a bus on B.C. Electric, and about a nickel for a chocolate bar. Life in Vancouver is never, ever hectic and in the basement of the old Grosvenor Hotel, good old radio station CJOR.”

If you knew Vancouver, like we knew Vancouver, oh, oh, oh what a town! There was none so classic, simply fantastic, do you remember downtown Granville when it was still magic.

The Sylvia Hotel still covered in vines, and CHQM’S ‘Candlelight and Wine’. Bill Bellman’s ‘ALMANAC on CBUT Channel TWO. Bob Fortune still doing the weather using a weather balloon! If you knew Vancouver, like we knew Vancouver, oh, oh, what a town!”

Please visit www.Nostalgicroads.Weebly.com. Search for Song CD’s by Dan Propp via cdbaby.com and also www.soundcloud.com, plus books via www.amazon.ca. Songs and videos now available on Youtube by searching Dan Propp. Accordion to some, Dan can be reached at ajpropp@shaw.ca.