The Best Little Movie House in Vancouver

Photo Credit: Expo 86 The Handsworth jazz band performing on stage.

NOSTALGIC VANCOUVER: EXPO 86 was good for everybody. It sure put Vancouver on the map. Everyone came! It was a great party and woke everyone up, including Dean. We hadn’t been doing much dancing since Dean had his heart bypass surgery in 1980. When we were home in Vancouver, he just lay around the house watching TV. Dean Jr. would build him electronic toys to turn the TV on and off from the other room and other things to help him out. But I needed to find a way to motivate him to get him out and to walk again. Expo provided that opportunity. Every day we walked all over the grounds from one end to the other. It was great! Soon, he was starting to get his resilience back not to mention his enthusiasm. The excitement of seeing people from all over the world right here in our backyard was contagious. We even started dancing again at the top of the Hotel Vancouver. -excerpt from It Ain’t Over Until Faye Leung the Hat lady Sings

It was also good for music education in Canada. Music students from Handsworth, Argyle and Carson Graham Secondary Schools competed against 7,800 others from across Canada at Expo in False Creek.

Locally from the north shore competing were, Handsworth music teachers Bob Rebagliati and Mary Bachun. From Argyle, music teachers Janet Warren and Ken Osterreicher, and from Carson Graham music teachers Rob Karr and Peter Taylor.

Rob Karr, one of the festival organizers, said the schools did “extremely well,” and North Vancouver was better represented than any other region in Canada at the invitation-only awards festival.
“It’s really a credit to the music programs in North Vancouver,” he said. “The size of the festival was really phenomenal, and it was the first time a national music festival has gone on at a world festival. We literally had world famous adjudicators.” –excerpts from Handsworth Music Dynasty

The Canadian Stage and Concert Band Festival and the Canadian Vocal Festival were held at Douglas College but spilled onto the Expo grounds in False Creek. They had 400 bands, combos and choirs from all over Canada and the US gathered for juried competition, workshops, concerts and informal jam sessions. BC kids did wonderfully well.
The graceful Chinguacousy band from Ontario was the gold medal winner for senior high school bands but Nanaimo Senior Secondary, a previous gold medal winner, took the silver and Robron Secondary of Campbell River won the bronze.

Handsworth of North Vancouver won the intermediate gold and three other golds, put five soloists in the jazz and concert idioms on all-star bands and a Handsworth Grade 11 student, Nooshim Khoshkhesal won a medal and a $1,500 scholarship for her lead and solo trumpet ability. That’s right, I said her. Nooshim is a girl of Iranian extraction who, they say, can pin you to the wall with her trumpet. Denny Boyd

Photo Credit: British Columbia Beefeater Band

There was a lot of controversy later over the sale of the EXPO lands. The B.C. government advertised for bids to purchase the Expo lands when Expo 86 was over. There was a big fight between Premier Vander Zalm and MLA Grace McCarthy. Vander Zalm wanted his developer friend Peter Toigle to buy the Expo lands.

Members in the government soon found themselves all thinking in a group mentality. They could all see dollar signs as far as the Expo lands were concerned. They wanted to leave everybody behind and keep going in their own direction. None of them could break away from thinking as a group. Once they felt the lure of fresh, crisp greenbacks they became recklessly infected and insensible to anything else and wanted to be the richest in their ranks. When all laid eyes on the possibilities before them they lost it! Some felt they had been had when it didn’t work out in their favor but they all quickly realized it was an experiment and that there was more where that came from if they kept traveling in the same direction.

There was little money in the government coffers after Expo had spun its magic so anyway they could find to get it back was okay. The usual revenue building ways were too slow now as Vancouver had graduated into the big leagues. They were advised to go it alone meaning finding new ways of building up revenue streams without all the baggage from the pre Expo days. Look outside of Canada was the mantra and they all got turned on to the wealth they had seen passing through town during Expo. No matter what they did all they could see was all this money erupting from pockets and shirt sleeves as it passed from one hand to another. It was enticing and mesmerizing and exploded their world from top to bottom.

The bidding was unfair. “It wasn’t cheap, something like thirty-six to fifty million, to clean up False Creek.” When the lands were put out for tender, I received a package. I made a bid on behalf of a group of local builders. Our package stated that we would first have to pay for the clean-up of False Creek. The government used us and other bidders as a, ‘call for bidders.’ It was just a public show for bids when their backroom deals were already made and rubber-stamped at huge losses and costs to the taxpayers. Li Ka-Shing negotiated with the government to remove the clause about the contaminated soil removal by the purchaser, having the costs paid by the government . I can’t help remembering what Li-Ka-Shing had told me over lunch in Hong Kong in 1980,
“I only buy undervalued land and properties.” Someone didn’t do their homework. Li Ka-Shing wound up selling a small corner of the land to Mr. Hui’s, Concorde Pacific and that covered his purchase price in full. He then sold them the rest of the property and made millions. Concorde then built all those towers. They got all the Expo land for a bargain except, the Plaza of Nation’s land which was owned by an Indonesian group and the Edgewater Casino which was held by another. All local bidders dropped out because they would have had to clean up False Creek and it was too expensive. –excerpt from It Ain’t Over Until Faye Leung the Hat Lady Sings

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