With approximately 100 archival photos, playwright Jesse Donaldson's This Day in Vancouver (Anvil 2013 $32) is a compendium of facts about Vancouver, one for each day of the year. It was a finalist for the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award.

According to promotional materials: "The City of Vancouver has been through a lot in its first 127 years. It's a city that has played host to the likes of Mark Twain, Alice Cooper, Elvis Presley, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, Louis Armstrong, Howard Hughes, Expo '86, and the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It's the birthplace of Canada's first female MLA, the country's first (and largest) clothing-optional beach, and the reason for the first nationwide prohibition legislation. It was the final resting place of Errol Flynn, and the city where two of his genital warts were briefly (and posthumously) kidnapped. It has been a hotbed of political activism, technological innovation, and bitter racial tension. It is the site of the West Coast's first electric light, and the nation's first female police officers, as well as home to world-renowned actors, deadly snipers, twisted serial killers, UFOs, the founders of Greenpeace, an official Town Fool, and even the headquarters for the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. It's a city on a journey; a journey that has taken it from being an unrefined, out-of-the-way, frontier logging village, to its current position as one of the most livable cities in the world. This Day in Vancouver is the story of that 127-year journey, one day at a time."

Donaldson's second book, examines the pervasive role of real estate developers in Vancouver's history. From publicity for the book: "Ever since Europeans first laid claim to the Squamish Nation territory in the 1870s, the real estate industry has held the region in its grip. Its influence has been grotesquely pervasive at every level of civic life, determining landmarks like Stanley Park and City Hall, as well as street names, neighbourhoods -- even the name 'Vancouver' itself. Land of Destiny aims to explore that influence, starting in 1862, with the first sale of land in the West End, and continuing up until the housing crisis of today." Donaldson explores the backroom dealings, the skulduggery and nepotism, the racism and the obscene profits, while at the same time, "revealing that the same forces which made Vancouver what it is -- speculation and global capital -- are the same ones that shape it today."

Fool's Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver's Official Town Fool (Anvil 2020) is another in the series '49. 2: Tales from the Off Beat', which are dedicated to celebrating the eccentric and unusual aspects of Vancouver. In Fool's Gold, Donaldson explores the legacy of Joachim Foikis, 35-year-old former social worker named Joachim Foikis who, in 1968, received $3,500 from the Canada Council for the Arts in order to finance a unique, self-imposed mission unseen since Elizabethan England: reinvent the vanished tradition of Town Fool. Foikis, who held two university degrees (one in economics from the University of Berlin, and the other in literature from the University of British Columbia), was already well known throughout the city for his off-kilter antics. His aim, according to interviews with The Sun and The Province, was "to spread joy and confusion" while at the same time "mock the four pillars of society: money, status, respectability, and conformity."

Co-authored by Erika Dyck, The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital (Anvil $18) is about a New Westminster hospital that treated psychological disorders between 1957 ad 1968. The Hollywood Hospital didn’t look like much; it was just a rambling white mansion, mostly obscured behind the holly trees from which it took its name. But, it served as a mecca for alcoholics, anxiety patients, and unhappy couples with its unorthodox methods boasting a success rate of 50-80%, and attracting scores of celebrity patients, including Andy Williams, Cary Grant, and Ethel Kennedy. Those same methods would eventually bring about the facility’s downfall, as well as the condemnation of physicians, the government, and the police. Because, for the better part of a decade, Hollywood Hospital was the site of more than 6000 supervised LSD trips. Under the care of psychiatrist J. Ross MacLean and researcher/ex-spy Al “Captain Trips” Hubbard, it was the only medical facility in BC (and one of a handful across the country) venturing into the brave new world of psychedelic psychiatry — from a specialized inner sanctum known as the Acid Room.

BOOKS

The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital (Anvil, 2021) $18 978-1-77214-186-3. Co-author Erika Dyck.

Fool's Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver's Official Town Fool (Anvil, 2020) $18 978-1-77214-146-7

Land of Destiny: A History of Vancouver Real Estate (Anvil, 2019) $20 978-1-77214144-3

This Day in Vancouver (Anvil, 2013) $32 978-1-92738042-0

[BCBW 2020]

Reviews of the author's work by BC Studies:
This Day in Vancouver

REVIEWS


by John Moore

Depending on which rung of the city's so-called 'property ladder' you happen to be teetering, just that subtitle (A History of Vancouver Real Estate) of Jesse Donaldson's corrosive chronicle of more than a century of land prices -- inflated by speculation, back-room insider deals, unmitigated greed, blatant nepotism and shameless conflicts of interest -- is enough to provoke wailings, gnashing of teeth and the demented laughter of the damned.

"Before Vancouver was a city, it was -- first and foremost -- a real estate investment," Donaldson says in the introduction. The reader is invited to substitute "swindle," "hustle," "con game" or "boondoggle" for the word "investment" at almost any point in Donaldson's blood-boiling exposition of why taking out a crippling mortgage to buy into the Vancouver property market should be sufficient cause to get you pink-sheeted under the Mental Health Act and confined in an appropriate facility until you recover your wits.

The main title, Land of Destiny is an ironic mockery of the kind of platitudinous post-Imperial hype used by property speculators in late 19th and early 20th century to market land all over the planet as the mania for building railroads opened up the 'dark continents' of North America, Africa, Asia and eastern Russia to questionable development by the so-called civilized nations who could afford them.

Everywhere the steel rails went, worthless wilderness was magically transformed into prime real estate, peoples who had lived there for millennia were dispossessed by legal fiat (backed up with gunpowder), and desperate land-hungry immigrants got fleeced of their meagre life's savings like hick rubes on a carnival midway.

Vancouver was not unique in this respect. It may now be in the sense that few other such cities have had their dirty laundry aired as thoroughly and conspicuously as Donaldson hangs out Vancouver's skid-marked underwear on the Lion's Gate Bridge in this appalling account of the machinations of Vancouver's early 'city fathers.'

*

Take, for example, the fleecing of one Rudyard Kipling.

In his book Vancouver & Its Writers, Alan Twigg has previously noted that Rudyard Kipling had been greatly impressed by British Columbia during his wedding tour of North America in 1892. He was so pleased that he purchased a town lot in the Mt. Pleasant area (subdivision 264A, Ward Five) prior to embarking for Japan from the CPR dock on the Empress of India on April 4, 1892.

Kipling later wrote in American Notes: "He that sold it to me was a delightful English boy. All the boy said was, 'I give you my word it isn't on a cliff or under water, and before long the town ought to move out that way.' And I took it as easily as a man buys a piece of tobacco. I became owner of 400 well-developed pines, thousands of tons of granite scattered in blocks at the roots of the pines, and a sprinkling of earth. That's a town lot in Vancouver. You or your agent hold onto it till property rises, then sell out and buy more land farther out of town and repeat the process. I do not quite see how this sort of thing helps the growth of a town, but the English boy says it is the 'essence of speculation' so it must be all right. But I wish there were fewer pines and rather less granite on the ground."

Kipling was duped. When he returned in 1907, he learned that he'd been paying taxes on property legally owned by someone else.

Privately, Kipling wrote, "All the consolation we got from the smiling people of Vancouver was, "You bought that from Steve, did you? Ah-hah, Steve! You hadn't ought to ha' bought from Steve. No! Not from Steve!' And thus, did the good Steve cure us of speculating in real estate."

*

Fair warning: if you read this book in the closet-sized 'den' of your 700 square foot Yaletown loft, on the miniscule patio of your North Vancouver townhouse coldly shaded by a dozen other such units, or in the 'bonus room' over the double garage of your Surrey stucco cracker-box palace while calculating that your grandchildren will inherit your mortgage payments, you may be tempted to commit acts of vandalism or arson directed at City Hall or the nearest realtors' office.

Donaldson's complex, humorous, outraged and entertaining narrative is not a simplistic call-to-arms. It is as informative as it is incendiary. In the course of this caustic history, Donaldson documents the racist caveats that often accompanied real estate sales, in which prospective buyers of properties in certain up-market areas of Vancouver willingly signed undertakings not to sell their property to any person of Oriental or Negro persuasion. It's embarrassing to note that these disgraceful codicils continued into the 1960s before they were publicly shamed out of print, though their spirit lingers in certain parts of the city to this day as wealthy Asian newcomers move into neighbourhoods formerly reserved for British Imperial exiles and their pampered progeny.

After the Confederation of the eastern colonies in 1867, leaders of the emerging nation of Canada faced a choice harder than the rock of the Canadian Shield. They could content themselves with becoming a small nation in the north-east corner of North America, a double bed uncomfortably shared with a formerly subject French population, and surrender the Pacific Coast to the aggressively expansionist United States; or they could hock their future to build a transcontinental railroad that would unite them with the British colonies of the Pacific Coast, thwarting the American policy of Manifest Destiny and giving Canada a port to engage in trade with the entire Pacific Rim.

For a nascent Canada, a Pacific port linked by rail to the grain belt of the Prairies was a vital economic artery, for which they were prepared to cut any kind of Devil's bargain with railroad-builders. The Faustian pact Canada made with the CPR is a recurring theme in this book, since it affected speculation in Vancouver real estate, but that's a whole other equally lurid story. Pierre Berton's account of the building of the CPR, The Last Spike was published in 1971. It's overdue for "updating," as real estate agents say, and I can't imagine a better qualified writer than Jesse Donaldson to take John Henry's steel-drivin' hammer to that tale.

Meanwhile, Donaldson's account of the bare-faced hustles -- from the speculators who secretly lobbied for the site of the Canadian Pacific Railroad terminus, to the first mayors and city aldermen who were among the foremost property speculators, right up to the dubious sale of the Expo 86 lands on False Creek to offshore billionaire Li Ka-Shing, whose Concord Pacific company pre-sold unbuilt condos-in-the-air to Hong Kong investors without giving the local sharks so much as a taste of blood -- should be a lesson to us all in the ways of the world.

++++

Fool’s Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver’s
Official Town Fool by Jesse Donaldson (Anvil $18)

By Alan Twigg

It took 52 years before filmmaker Aaron Sorkin could re-create the counter-cultural turbulence of the Sixties for The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Thinking positively, perhaps some enterprising Canadian filmmaker can now finally have the jam and moola to make a movie about Kim (Joachim) Foikis, aka The Town Fool.

Former Georgia Straight theatre critic Tom Shandel had the smarts to make a documentary back in the day, Superfool (1968), but since then the mystery behind this pivotal figure in Canada’s counter-cultural has been unexamined.

The Town Fool used to be famous—and loved—Canada-wide. Jesse Donaldson has done us a huge favour by cobbling together the best semblance of a biography that anyone could manage with Fool’s Gold: The Life and Legacy of Vancouver’s Official Town Fool.

The would-be movie, The Fool’s Journey, could start with four men, all on their backs, on an expensive blue rug with Chinese designs in the Kitsilano home of UBC philosopher Arthur Link in 1966. They hold hands. Their four heads are touching. They have formed a cross. Each has swallowed 800mcg of LSD, eight times the amount normally used for an acid trip.

One man is a soft-spoken social worker, age 35, whose early boyhood was in Nazi Germany. He has degrees in theology and economics. He is studying for a third degree in library sciences at UBC. He has some serious troubles on this virgin voyage into psychedelia. He imagines his own crucifixion. Hours later, after losing himself, he regains his wits and announces, “I feel like a fool.”

Foikis later claimed this acid trip “verified my natural mysticism” and after that “I get high on Mother Goose, not drugs.” But the die was cast.

These details of Kim Foikis’ transformative epiphany are supplied by Donaldson as he peripatetically traces the rise and fall of Foikis—a clever man who gained international notoriety but lost his wife and children in the bargain.

At 36, as a centennial project, Foikis applied to the City of Vancouver for a license for his tomfoolery. Only after some research did the would-be jester learn that fools were never civic employees. They were paid servants for royalty.

Well, Foikis hoped, he could break new ground. Such were the times. Vancouver was giving the world Greenpeace and a few years later a Western Front performance artist, Vincent Trasov, would officially run for mayor as Mr. Peanut, dressed as a gigantic peanut and endorsed by William S. Burroughs. (Trasov gained 2,685 votes.)
“I want to be a catalyst to the imagination,” Foikis pronounced. “Instead of becoming a preacher, I decided to become a fool…. My plan is to contribute to the imagination explosion.”

Dressed in traditional, handmade, red-and-blue fool’s motley (two outfits were sewn by his wife—one to wear and one to wash), dispensing philosophy to adults and nursery rhymes to children, Foikis gained national attention when he received a $3,500 Canada Council grant and declared himself Vancouver’s official Town Fool on April Fools’ Day, 1968, quitting his job in favour of fulltime folly.

Soon humourless right wingers such as Mayor Tom Campbell attacked the increasingly meddlesome philosopher/clown as a welfare bum. All the better. Foikis meddled with the status quo, mobilizing street parties in the Downtown Eastside, disrupting meetings and asking city council to adopt a new “Fool Tax” that would be one cent per ordinary citizen, and two cents per politician. In his banter, he easily humiliated Vancouver Sun gossip columnist Jack Wasserman.

Everyone’s Fool but nobody’s fool, he could blithely quote William Blake, Shakespeare, Plato, etc. He taught a five-week course on fairy tales at UBC and gave talks on mythology at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He was invited to Essalen Institute at Big Sur, California, possibly rubbing shoulders with Ravi Shankar and The Beatles. (It is tempting to suggest Foikis might have influenced Paul McCartney’s song ‘Fool on the Hill’, but the lyrics were worked on between March and September of 1967 and it was George Harrison who was at Essalen in 1968, not Paul.)

Foikis had always been taken seriously by the press—he made great copy. But the same old act started to wear thin as Foikis worked harder to make himself a product of the times. His troubles began in 1969 when he totalled his jalopy in a Burnaby car accident. For transportation purposes, Foikis bought a pair of donkeys (Peter and Pan) and although they proved useful when he wanted to make a nuisance of himself—by driving a donkey-drawn wagon up Cambie Street at rush hour—they were financially draining.

Donkeys on the streets of Vancouver were illegal. After innumerable by-law fines, Foikis sold them for $120—by which time he was broke. “Next year,” he said, “maybe I’ll get an elephant.”

Initially his wife Wendy had supported his mission to ferret out folly as a latter-day Diogenes, but she became disenchanted when his travelling left her alone with their children, Martin and Rebecca for months on end—so she eventually left him, taking the children with her to England.

By the early 1970s, Foikis was an itinerant Fool, hanging out in Toronto’s Rochdale, hitchhiking across Canada, squatting in a cabin on Bowen. We learn he last saw his wife and daughter in 1975.

Tracing the early days of a trickster is tricky. From Donaldson we learn Foikis was born in Poland in 1931 in a village near Auschwitz. At age four his mother took him to live in Berlin where she ran a toy shop. Originally, the Foikis family hailed from the Greek province of Phokis.

[It’s not mentioned but, bizarrely, our Juan de Fuca Strait is named for the Greek-born mariner Ioannis Phokas, better known by the Spanish translation of his name, Juan de Fuca, who, in the service of the King of Spain, reputedly explored the waters that bear his name between Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula before Juan Perez (1774) and James Cook (1778). A statue of Phokas/de Fuca, the possible ‘discoverer’ of B.C., was recently erected in Kefalonia, Greece.)

At age ten, Foikis had conformed and joined the Hitler Youth, but he recoiled at twelve when he first saw the deportment of Jews. Donaldson includes an unattributed quote from him: “I stopped saying Heil Hitler and dropped out of Hitler Youth and the Roman Catholic Church.”

Tracing Foikis “self-imposed exile” on Lasqueti Island since 1975 has also proved confounding. Living without electricity and running water, he was apparently well-liked, garrulous and a good gardener until he left in 1989. He gravitated to a communal house in Esquimalt, reverting to his former life as an introverted bookworm.

In 2007, Joachim Foikis died tragically and foolishly in Victoria, at age 72. When he heard a band playing near the Parliament Buildings, he leapt onto a boardwalk wall above the Inner Harbour, started merrily dancing like the Fool of old, lost his footing and fell two storeys onto the rocks below. There was no obituary. His death went largely unreported until Rod Mickleburgh mentioned the accidental fall a month later in the Globe & Mail.

His could be a juicy role. A comic tragedy. Make of it what you will. As Donaldson wisely states at the outset, “There’s a very good chance I’m misrepresenting Kim Foikis. But as far as I can tell, that would be okay with him.”

Chronologically mixed-up but always lively, Donaldson’s slim, vital bio is a godsend—more for accumulating what The Fool said, as much as for who he was.
“I want to be a mythic character,” he told the filmmaker Tom Shandel, “and I want to create a legend—a Vancouver legend.” 978-1-77214-146-7

[BCBW 2021]

The Acid Room: The Psychedelic Trials and Tribulations of Hollywood Hospital by Jesse Donaldson & Erika Dyck
(Anvil $18)

Review by John Moore (BCBW 2022)

“If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.”

This oft-misattributed Eighties joke (officially credited to L.A. comedian Charlie Fleischer) implied that people who were really there were so stoned on newly popular psychedelic drugs like LSD-25 that they couldn’t recall ten years of the most fun you can have with your clothes on and off. Like most slow wit that passes for observational humour, it sounds cleverly definitive yet it’s about as accurate as your Fourth Avenue drug dealer’s assurances that the Lysergic Acid you were getting was ‘clinical’ or came direct from the pocket of the legendary Grateful Dead soundman and amateur chemist Owsley Stanley himself.

In this concise entertaining history of New Westminster’s long-demolished Hollywood Hospital, Jesse Donaldson and Erika Dyck take a trip back in time that sets the record straight on what was clearly a lost opportunity for psychiatric medicine. Located in a white mansion surrounded by holly trees (hence its name), the hospital treated psychological disorders from 1957 to 1975. Its unorthodox methods, which produced a remarkable success rate of 50-80% included, for a time, the new field of psychedelic psychiatry and attracted a long line of celebrity patients such as Andy Williams, Cary Grant and Ethel Kennedy. More than 6,000 medically supervised LSD trips were conducted in a special area known as the Acid Room. Such unorthodox treatments eventually led to the hospital’s closure despite its success rate.

Finding out that the old Hollywood Hospital was not only one of the original epicentres of the Acid Trip, but the place where the ideal Acid Room, (provided with comfy couches, patterned and textured fabrics, art works, music etc.) was designed and described in a therapeutic manual is “mind-blowing,” as we said back in the day.
Donaldson and Dyck trip lightly through the development of LSD-25 by Albert Hofmann of the Swiss Sandoz pharmaceutical company in 1938, while pursuing a treatment for migraine headaches. Returning from an accidental acid trip, (not the world’s first; also covered here) Hofmann’s reports on LSD’s effects languished until after WW2 when, in the early Fifties, some psychiatrists who, despairing of their discipline’s lack of progress in dealing with mental health issues, began looking for alternative methods. ‘Better Living Through Chemistry,’ a variant of the 1935 DuPont slogan, had become the mantra of the pharmaceutical industry (which produced amphetamines and anti-depressants before the war) long before it became an acid-head t-shirt banner a decade later.
Early experiments with LSD revealed that it was a particularly successful treatment for chronic alcoholism, a mental illness notoriously resistant to conversational therapy. Anybody lucky enough to hang out fifty years later with friends from those days knows the effects of psychedelic drugs are the exact opposite of the belligerent behaviour, stupefaction and memory loss produced by alcohol. (“Booze is a bum trip,” we said then.)

Under the influence of psychedelics, people became peaceful, hyper-aware of their own most authentic emotions and of their deep spiritual connection to the rest of humanity and especially the natural world.

Unlike drunks, LSD users remember their experiences as intellectual and emotional turning points for the rest of their lives. Since Hollywood Hospital was primarily a private detox clinic for wealthy dipsomaniacs, its doctors were willing to give LSD a try. They found the drug enabled patients to discover the emotions that drove them to drink in a non-confrontational way, causing them to give up booze without fear. A few were so thoroughly cured they were later able to drink socially, a notion still taboo among alcoholic recovery programs today.

In 1959, young Vancouver Province reporter Ben Metcalfe underwent LSD therapy and wrote a series of prescient articles about it for the paper. That same year, film star Cary Grant extolled the virtues of LSD in a Look magazine interview. Later, celebrities like The Beatles, Carrie Fisher, Steve Jobs, Sting, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Bourdain, Susan Sarandon and Bill Gates would testify to the positive life-changing effects of LSD.

Radical new ideas always attract eccentric characters, would-be messiahs and self-appointed grand inquisitors. Psychedelic psychiatry got the full cattle-call of cast members, from stars like author Aldous Huxley, whose 1954 book The Doors of Perception described his life-changing experiences with mescaline (and gave The Doors rock band their name), to Al ‘the Captain’ Hubbard, the original Captain Trips, the pistol-packing wild boy who had the exclusive contract with Sandoz to import LSD-25 until amateur alchemists like Owsley Stanley cut into his action. Hubbard is a bio-worthy subject on his own, never mind UBC head of psychiatry Dr. James Tyhurst who, along with Dr. Pat McGeer, were responsible for demonizing LSD and having it criminalized (leading to the closure of Hollywood Hospital). The donnish pipe-smoking Tyhurst proved to be no upstanding citizen. He was later convicted of coercing female patients into master-slave sexual relationships involving whips etc. that went on for years. No wonder he was afraid of LSD.

With his books Land of Destiny (Anvil, 2019) about the development of Vancouver as a real estate swindle and Fools Gold (Anvil, 2020), the story of Joachim Foikis, Vancouver’s Official Town Fool, Jesse Donaldson has emerged as the successor to Ben Metcalfe and the legendary Chuck Cook as the keeper of Vancouver’s ‘Closet of Secrets’. Erika Dyck is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. She’s the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry, Facing Eugenics, co-author of Managing Madness and co-editor of Psychedelic Prophets. As we said in the Sixties of dealers who had a dependable sense of quality control, “She really knows
her shit.” 9781772141863

John Moore drove cab in the early ’70s and had occasion to drop off dipsomaniacs at the Hollywood Hospital.