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University of Victoria Awards Honorary Doctorate
June 9, 2003
Howard White has come a long way since growing up in his father's logging camp with only one book for company--not that the camp's imposing,leather-bound copy of the Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan made lively company for a crew of grizzled loggers and a young boy in the 1950s.
White, who never saw the inside of a classroom until he was 10 and ended his formal education as a dropout from the University of BC in 1969, went on to compensate for his culturally deprived childhood by publishing over 400 books about logging, fishing and pioneer life in BC through his family firm, Harbour Publishing. But he always felt guilty about failing to get a university degree after his father had worked so hard to put him through school.
On June 5, the University of Victoria set matters right by awarding him an honorary Doctorate of Laws at its spring convocation. "God knows how these things happen, Dad, but I hope you are feeling better today," White, 58, said in his acceptance speech at the University Centre Thursday. The author's father, Frank White, 89, was in the audience to witness the long-awaited event.
University presenter Dr. Anthony Jenkins told the convocation White had "enabled fishers and loggers, story tellers and poets, to weave their voices into the nation's fabric," citing White's Raincoast Chronicles series, historical books like The Great Bear Rainforest , poetry anthologies like Breathing Fire, and The Encyclopedia of British Columbia as examples.
Jenkins also praised White's efforts as a writer, noting that he had won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his 1990 collection, Writing in the Rain, among many other honours. He quoted the poet Lorna Crozier, who said "Howard White has placed this province on the map, both for those of us who live here and those from away. He has given us words to dwell in so we can come closer to an understanding of this place we call home. What a gift that has been!"
White was one of six to receive honorary degrees at the convocation. Others included ethnobotanist Wade Davis, former Lieutenant Governor Garde Gardom, broadcaster Mark Starowicz, retired professor Norma Mickelson and Mexican educator Antonio Leano Alvarez de Castillo.
[Press Release, June 2003]
ACCEPTANCE SPEEACH BY HOWARD WHITE
Thank you Mr. Chancellor. I am immensely honoured.
The entire White clan is honoured, or more accurately, astonished. You see, I grew up in a logging camp. I always feel I have to make that clear at the outset, so people can adjust their expectations.
You've heard of one-horse towns. Ours was a one-book camp.
We owned it and until the age of twelve it was the only book I'd ever seen. It was called The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan. My parents weren't religious, but their parents had been religious enough to do for the next three generations and my mother inherited The Great Controversy when Gramma died. Gramma owned a pretty good dairy farm on Sumas Prairie mostly by virtue of the fact she made her kids work like Trojans. A lot of people in her place would have been tempted to return the favour by spreading the wealth around a little, but Gramma was a woman of rare principal so she spread it mainly to places like Phil Gagliardi's radio bible program. After she died and my parents were past needing it, they did get a modest settlement, but while the old lady lived we saw not a penny. Instead of money we got The Great Controversy Between Christ And Satan.
It was no doubt an act of generosity in her way of thinking because she had a lot of money and who knows what kind of sinful ways it might have led us into. And there was no denying it, The Great Controversy was a pretty impressive book.
A monster it was, all tooled leather and gilt edging. It held a place of prominence in our cookhouse for years. Everybody who came by ended up hauling it down at one time or another because it was the only thing in camp that wasn't directly connected to getting logs in the water. They would open it, too, but just to admire the psychedelic marbelling on the endpapers. They knew better than to try reading the words. I tried it a couple of times but could make no sense of it.
Dad used to refer to it bitterly as the $100-thousand-dollar book, and it was regarded with abhorrence by our entire family. Even the men in the crew joined in detesting it, I guess because they thought if Dad had inherited the $100 thousand instead of Gaglardi he would have been able to afford some new chokers and put up a bit better grub.
For a long time I thought it really was worth $100 thousand and it was years before I realized the full weight of my father's bitterness. To me the most interesting thing about that book was it had an actual bookworm in it which was diligently honeycombing the leather spine.
It must have been lonely work. I'm sure he was the only bookworm of any kind in that part of the country.
People have often said to me that this must have been a discouraging upbringing for a future writer and publisher, but this is not the case. I was surrounded on all sides by the most effective kind of encouragement a boy could ask for. Our crew was comprised of broken down toothless, liverless, one-eyed old loggers who never passed me by without chorusing the refrain, "git a eddication, kid an ya won't end up like us.";
It made an impression.
My mother has left us but my father is here today, and in spite of their rather short bookshelf (in those days--my mother discovered the Book-of-the-Month Club later), they raised me to worship the world of thought, of education, and they worked long hours monkey wrenching their old trucks through the night to get my sisters and I through school and on the path of higher learning, which they once dreamed of taking themselves. Dad had grown up in Abbotsford during the 1920s and was the best scholar in the valley, but when he was 14 his father died and the stock market crashed in the same year, and that was the end of his educational dreams, but they never stopped dreaming they'd see their children go where they had been denied.
Well, with him and his crew of reprobates cheering me on, I made it to UBC in 1965 but I didn't get my degree. I was too eager to drop out and start an underground newspaper, which was the fashion in those days. I tried to explain to Dad that I had taken the measure of the academic world and found it wanting, and I think he wanted to believe me, but I suspect it was one of the great disappointments of his life. Well, Dad, God only knows how these things happen, but I hope you feel better today.
I take enormous satisfaction in this honour, and not just personally. I know this is really not for me, this is for Jim Spilsbury and Bus Griffiths and Frank White and Pete Trower and all of the extraordinary but otherwise quite unsung BC people Mary and I have had the great privilege to give voice to over the years of operating our kitchen table publishing company in Pender Harbour.
What I will take credit for is the idea that the local matters, that lives of our fathers and mothers is more than an incidental curiosity, that the history of our communities is not minor culture, it is the root from which all our culture grows. It's not my idea, but it's an idea that seems to have fallen to me to act out in this place in this time. I won't let on I'm alone in this--I wouldn't dare with Jack Hodgins in the room--but it has been lonely work at times, and I sometimes grow tired of the sound of my own voice repeating "the local, the local, the local"; like the proverbial ass braying in the woods. Certainly, we are in a time now when my kind of ass is completely drowned out by a whole herd of bigger asses braying "the global, the global, the global"; and for that reason that this recognition is doubly appreciated.
Thank you.
Howard White has come a long way since growing up in his father's logging camp with only one book for company--not that the camp's imposing,leather-bound copy of the Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan made lively company for a crew of grizzled loggers and a young boy in the 1950s.
White, who never saw the inside of a classroom until he was 10 and ended his formal education as a dropout from the University of BC in 1969, went on to compensate for his culturally deprived childhood by publishing over 400 books about logging, fishing and pioneer life in BC through his family firm, Harbour Publishing. But he always felt guilty about failing to get a university degree after his father had worked so hard to put him through school.
On June 5, the University of Victoria set matters right by awarding him an honorary Doctorate of Laws at its spring convocation. "God knows how these things happen, Dad, but I hope you are feeling better today," White, 58, said in his acceptance speech at the University Centre Thursday. The author's father, Frank White, 89, was in the audience to witness the long-awaited event.
University presenter Dr. Anthony Jenkins told the convocation White had "enabled fishers and loggers, story tellers and poets, to weave their voices into the nation's fabric," citing White's Raincoast Chronicles series, historical books like The Great Bear Rainforest , poetry anthologies like Breathing Fire, and The Encyclopedia of British Columbia as examples.
Jenkins also praised White's efforts as a writer, noting that he had won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his 1990 collection, Writing in the Rain, among many other honours. He quoted the poet Lorna Crozier, who said "Howard White has placed this province on the map, both for those of us who live here and those from away. He has given us words to dwell in so we can come closer to an understanding of this place we call home. What a gift that has been!"
White was one of six to receive honorary degrees at the convocation. Others included ethnobotanist Wade Davis, former Lieutenant Governor Garde Gardom, broadcaster Mark Starowicz, retired professor Norma Mickelson and Mexican educator Antonio Leano Alvarez de Castillo.
[Press Release, June 2003]
ACCEPTANCE SPEEACH BY HOWARD WHITE
Thank you Mr. Chancellor. I am immensely honoured.
The entire White clan is honoured, or more accurately, astonished. You see, I grew up in a logging camp. I always feel I have to make that clear at the outset, so people can adjust their expectations.
You've heard of one-horse towns. Ours was a one-book camp.
We owned it and until the age of twelve it was the only book I'd ever seen. It was called The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan. My parents weren't religious, but their parents had been religious enough to do for the next three generations and my mother inherited The Great Controversy when Gramma died. Gramma owned a pretty good dairy farm on Sumas Prairie mostly by virtue of the fact she made her kids work like Trojans. A lot of people in her place would have been tempted to return the favour by spreading the wealth around a little, but Gramma was a woman of rare principal so she spread it mainly to places like Phil Gagliardi's radio bible program. After she died and my parents were past needing it, they did get a modest settlement, but while the old lady lived we saw not a penny. Instead of money we got The Great Controversy Between Christ And Satan.
It was no doubt an act of generosity in her way of thinking because she had a lot of money and who knows what kind of sinful ways it might have led us into. And there was no denying it, The Great Controversy was a pretty impressive book.
A monster it was, all tooled leather and gilt edging. It held a place of prominence in our cookhouse for years. Everybody who came by ended up hauling it down at one time or another because it was the only thing in camp that wasn't directly connected to getting logs in the water. They would open it, too, but just to admire the psychedelic marbelling on the endpapers. They knew better than to try reading the words. I tried it a couple of times but could make no sense of it.
Dad used to refer to it bitterly as the $100-thousand-dollar book, and it was regarded with abhorrence by our entire family. Even the men in the crew joined in detesting it, I guess because they thought if Dad had inherited the $100 thousand instead of Gaglardi he would have been able to afford some new chokers and put up a bit better grub.
For a long time I thought it really was worth $100 thousand and it was years before I realized the full weight of my father's bitterness. To me the most interesting thing about that book was it had an actual bookworm in it which was diligently honeycombing the leather spine.
It must have been lonely work. I'm sure he was the only bookworm of any kind in that part of the country.
People have often said to me that this must have been a discouraging upbringing for a future writer and publisher, but this is not the case. I was surrounded on all sides by the most effective kind of encouragement a boy could ask for. Our crew was comprised of broken down toothless, liverless, one-eyed old loggers who never passed me by without chorusing the refrain, "git a eddication, kid an ya won't end up like us.";
It made an impression.
My mother has left us but my father is here today, and in spite of their rather short bookshelf (in those days--my mother discovered the Book-of-the-Month Club later), they raised me to worship the world of thought, of education, and they worked long hours monkey wrenching their old trucks through the night to get my sisters and I through school and on the path of higher learning, which they once dreamed of taking themselves. Dad had grown up in Abbotsford during the 1920s and was the best scholar in the valley, but when he was 14 his father died and the stock market crashed in the same year, and that was the end of his educational dreams, but they never stopped dreaming they'd see their children go where they had been denied.
Well, with him and his crew of reprobates cheering me on, I made it to UBC in 1965 but I didn't get my degree. I was too eager to drop out and start an underground newspaper, which was the fashion in those days. I tried to explain to Dad that I had taken the measure of the academic world and found it wanting, and I think he wanted to believe me, but I suspect it was one of the great disappointments of his life. Well, Dad, God only knows how these things happen, but I hope you feel better today.
I take enormous satisfaction in this honour, and not just personally. I know this is really not for me, this is for Jim Spilsbury and Bus Griffiths and Frank White and Pete Trower and all of the extraordinary but otherwise quite unsung BC people Mary and I have had the great privilege to give voice to over the years of operating our kitchen table publishing company in Pender Harbour.
What I will take credit for is the idea that the local matters, that lives of our fathers and mothers is more than an incidental curiosity, that the history of our communities is not minor culture, it is the root from which all our culture grows. It's not my idea, but it's an idea that seems to have fallen to me to act out in this place in this time. I won't let on I'm alone in this--I wouldn't dare with Jack Hodgins in the room--but it has been lonely work at times, and I sometimes grow tired of the sound of my own voice repeating "the local, the local, the local"; like the proverbial ass braying in the woods. Certainly, we are in a time now when my kind of ass is completely drowned out by a whole herd of bigger asses braying "the global, the global, the global"; and for that reason that this recognition is doubly appreciated.
Thank you.
Submitted on June 10, 2003 in By David.
