Early Years
Gwen’s parents Les and Jeanne Coward moved to Trail shortly after the end of the Second World War. They had followed Jeanne’s mother and step-father to Canada seeking out new opportunities in British Columbia. Jeanne often tells us stories of their unfinished house, with no indoor plumbing, and having to go outside to hand scrub Les’s dirty clothes from the Cominco smelter where he first worked. This pioneer lifestyle was quite a big departure even from the war-ravaged London they had left behind.
Gwen was born on August 15th, 1950, growing the family to three. After a few more years in Trail, the whole family moved to Vancouver for new and different opportunities before eventually settling in Deep Cove in North Vancouver. In a sign of the times being a little simpler, Gwen’s favourite Christmas presents when she was young were a cowboy hat, a whistle, and a little doll with white hair. After school, Gwen would run home to make sure she caught The Monkees on TV and on weekends would take the long bus ride downtown with her friends or mum to watch the latest movie in theaters, like White Christmas or anything featuring The Beatles. This helped to instill a never-ending love for all the great music of the 60’s.
When Gwen was 12, it was discovered that she was living with a faulty heart valve. Her mum and dad made countless sacrifices to ensure that Gwen would get better, and she was able to receive lifesaving first-of-its-kind heart surgery. Although it would leave a large scar on her back, it allowed her story to carry on for many more years.
Soon after arriving in Vancouver, Les took an office job at Allied Builders in False Creek and became good friends with the company’s owner, my father Arthur.
Gwen and I first met one another when we were in high school. Our families were both at a naval architect’s convention at Harrison Hot Springs and our parents decided to put us together to entertain each other while they went out for a party. Neither of us liked the other much at that meeting.
The next time we met was at a going-away party for Gwen’s family, as her father got a job as a manager of another shipyard in Marystown, Newfoundland. Gwen stayed by herself in St. John’s while she attended university, but she was very unhappy with that experience and came back to Vancouver to stay with family friends after one term. She came over to visit a few times and soon we were dating, never to part again.
Gwen’s mum decided that she had made the right decision, and soon their family was all reunited back in Vancouver. Moving to Edgemont in North Vancouver, Gwen worked part-time assisting the vet at the local animal hospital.
We started going out when I was studying at BCIT in the winter of 1968. I worked the following summer at Bell Rock, near Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and received a very large collection of perfume-scented cards from her in the mail. When we were dating she liked to park by the first narrows in Stanley Park or Ambleside at night and watch the submarine races with me.
We got engaged on April 11th at Hy’s at the Sands, and seafood thermidor was her favourite dish for a long time after that. We went back to her parents’ house to surprise both our families that we were engaged, and Gwen’s father Les called my parents over to have a party. The wild parties in the basement of Les and Jeanne’s house remain legendary to this day. When it came time to get married, we picked an easy to remember wedding date: 10-10-1970.
After the wedding, it was on to the reception at Seymour Golf and Country Club. We had a large multi-tiered traditional wedding cake that Gwen and her mum made and had taken to the local specialty bakery to have it iced and decorated. When we held hands to make the first cut, the knife went nowhere, just stopping on the top of the big lower layer. This prompted a snarky comment from a relative in the crowd about who made the cake, which did not amuse Gwen’s mum one bit. What we didn’t know was that because the cake was so high, the decorator had placed a piece of decorative support board under the top layer of icing to make sure the cake stayed perfectly straight. We moved the knife to the edge of the cake, sliced away, and the celebration was on.
When it came time to leave the party to start our honeymoon, Neil, my best man, brought my car around for us. The wedding party had poured several bags of confetti down the front window defroster, and when he parked the car and turned it off, he set the defrost blower to high. We got in to leave, started the car, and got showered in confetti.
We spent the night at Harrison Hot Springs, back to where we first met, but with much different feelings for each other this time. Then it was down to a night in Portland and on to Gearhart, Oregon where the hotel had some small private cottages down by the beach. Gwen didn’t sleep much that night because she said it sounded like the waves were going to come through the door in the dark.
We went along with her parents for a month-long vacation together to England to visit all of their relatives. My mum bought us a trip to Paris while were there and we had a very memorable aborted wind turbulence landing. In Paris, we saw the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre and Mona Lisa, but not the Eifel Tower. We ended our trip with a fabulous dinner cruise on the Seine.
Our first home was a 7th floor apartment near the West Vancouver library with a view of the water down the road between two big waterfront apartments. We soon became good friends with the apartment managers, Al and Reia Humphries. When we came back from our trip to Europe, we got Gwen a brand-new car, a green two-door Toyota Corolla which she absolutely loved. We were able to get a covered parking spot at no charge because we were good friends with the apartment managers. We got a little poodle (Angie) to keep Gwen company during the day.
One day, we received a letter from the apartment owner Boris saying he didn’t want to do this anymore, and that we could either buy or leave. That was when we moved to our present home and started expanding our family.
