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2012 BC Book Prizes double win
For the Lieutenant Governor, it was a case of déjà vu all over again-twice-at the 28th annual B.C. Book Prizes.
First, on May 5, The Honourable Steven L. Point presented the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing to The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver in the beautiful Campbell River Museum. Then, on the following Saturday, Point was on-hand when the capstone of Chuck Davis' career received the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema in downtown Vancouver.
Three wins in three races. Davis' double victory for his 574-page bestseller on was, as they say on the Sports Channel, the highlight of the night.
Edna Davis accepted the Haig-Brown Prize for her late husband at the outset of the Book Prizes portion of the evening, and Davis' publisher Howard White accepted the Booksellers Choice Award about an hour later.
Here are publisher Howard White's remarks upon acceptance of the 2012 Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award.
----
This makes this book an all-around winner.
It wasn't always clear this would be the case.
Chuck first brought the idea to me about ten years ago, planning to have it done the next fall, but he extended the deadline so many times and the mass of his researches began to mount up to such a daunting bulk I despaired of him ever finishing and worried it would run to ten volumes.
When he phoned me to say he only had weeks to live, I stammered, "Chuck, I'm very sorry to hear that.";
He replied, "I'm not so keen about it myself.";
Typical Chuck. Never stuck for line.
I can just seem him greeting St. Peter, "I new I was on deadline, but this is ridiculous.";
Chuck dedicated himself to saving Vancouver's stories but he was one of our most remarkable stories himself. The product of a broken home, he spent part of his childhood in a home for foundlings. He became one of BC's most ubiquitous media personalities, but his first appearance in the media came as a waif left homeless when the Burnaby shack he and his father had been squatting in burned. He had only an elementary school education but became Vancouver's most popular historian.
And now this.
Chuck was a born again historian. He saw the light one day when he was driving to work across the Burrard St. bridge, as he said, for about the 10,000th time. He looked at those peculiar decorations, the twinkling stained-glass lanterns, the half-boaty things, one labelled V and the other labelled B and realized he'd been looking at them for years but never actually seeing them. This day, for some reason he saw them, and he said to himself, now those are very weird things. No other bridge has anything like them. There must be a story here. So he went straight to the archives and found that indeed there was a story, and it was a good one. The lanterns commemorated WWI POWs, who kept themselves warm by lighting fires in barrels, and the boaty things represented the ships of George Vancouver and Harry Burrard, although as Davis harrumphed, Burrard never came within 5,000 km of this area. And no, the cozy-looking little buildings atop the arches never held exclusive apartments or sentries quarters; they merely cover up a bunch of unsightly steel girders. But yes, the odd tunnels in the piers underneath the car deck were intended to carry a second deck for a railroad, which was never built. Chuck wrote about his discoveries in his column in the Province and it went over so well he kept on researching and kept on writing. In the course of this he discovered two things about local history. One, it was just bristling with fascinating stories. Two, they were for the most part languishing unnoticed in the archives, just like his decoding of the Burrard Bridge.
As one of BC's most versatile and ubiquitous media figures, Chuck was well positioned to do something about this, and he dedicated the rest of his life to making us all aware of the rich treasury of stories contained in our own local past. He wrote 194 more columns revealing more hidden gems and added 18 books including three enormous reference works that would individually count as life works for many writers.
Sometimes he despaired. Once he was delivering a slide show to a class of grade four, five and six students and put up an image showing the statue of Captain George Vancouver, which stands in front of City Hall.
"Who can tell me who that man is?"; he asked.
One hundred voices shouted out with complete confidence, "George Washington!";
He wondered if this was some kind of an anomaly and made sure to ask the same question at every school he went to. Out of forty-nine schools he visited all over metropolitan Vancouver, only once did he encounter a student who could identify the man after whom Vancouver was named.
Experiences like this made Chuck wonder if anybody was listening, or if anyone cared. Fortunately he did live to have his mind put quite substantially to rest on that quarter. In the fall of 2010 when he made a public appeal for help to finish this last book after being diagnosed with three kinds of cancer (a trifecta, he wryly called it), the response was truly magnificent to see. Alan Twigg moved the awarding of the 2010 George Woodcock award ahead six months so Chuck could see his name recorded in the writers' walk of fame outside the VPL, an honour that moved him to tears. Donations poured in, the media was full of stories crediting Chuck for singlehandedly raising awareness in Greater Vancouver history and an army of admiring colleagues stepped forward to help finish the job of getting his magnum opus to press. Chuck was heard to say, "My gosh, if I'd known my dying would go over this well I would have done it sooner!";
One honour he did not live to see was perhaps the most important one and that was from the people of BC. When this book which Chuck described as the capstone of his writing career finally reached the stores in late November of 2011, the people he had sometimes worried were not paying attention to his message voted with their feet and flooded into the stores in unprecedented numbers, opened their wallets and bought out the entire print run in one week. Then they bought out the second print run in two weeks. Several veteran booksellers said The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver was the fastest-selling book large hardcover they'd ever seen. It sold over 10,000 copies in six weeks. Not only did this show beyond any doubt that BC people are interested in their own stories, at least when they're presented with style and humour and drama the way Chuck did, it shows something also of interest to those of us gathered here tonight, and that is that at this late date there is still tremendous support in this province for that wonderful artefact known as the printed book. Thank you Chuck, for reassuring us on that point, and thank you, BC booksellers for this recognition.
[by Howard White, May 12, 2012]
First, on May 5, The Honourable Steven L. Point presented the Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing to The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver in the beautiful Campbell River Museum. Then, on the following Saturday, Point was on-hand when the capstone of Chuck Davis' career received the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award at the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema in downtown Vancouver.
Three wins in three races. Davis' double victory for his 574-page bestseller on was, as they say on the Sports Channel, the highlight of the night.
Edna Davis accepted the Haig-Brown Prize for her late husband at the outset of the Book Prizes portion of the evening, and Davis' publisher Howard White accepted the Booksellers Choice Award about an hour later.
Here are publisher Howard White's remarks upon acceptance of the 2012 Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice Award.
----
This makes this book an all-around winner.
It wasn't always clear this would be the case.
Chuck first brought the idea to me about ten years ago, planning to have it done the next fall, but he extended the deadline so many times and the mass of his researches began to mount up to such a daunting bulk I despaired of him ever finishing and worried it would run to ten volumes.
When he phoned me to say he only had weeks to live, I stammered, "Chuck, I'm very sorry to hear that.";
He replied, "I'm not so keen about it myself.";
Typical Chuck. Never stuck for line.
I can just seem him greeting St. Peter, "I new I was on deadline, but this is ridiculous.";
Chuck dedicated himself to saving Vancouver's stories but he was one of our most remarkable stories himself. The product of a broken home, he spent part of his childhood in a home for foundlings. He became one of BC's most ubiquitous media personalities, but his first appearance in the media came as a waif left homeless when the Burnaby shack he and his father had been squatting in burned. He had only an elementary school education but became Vancouver's most popular historian.
And now this.
Chuck was a born again historian. He saw the light one day when he was driving to work across the Burrard St. bridge, as he said, for about the 10,000th time. He looked at those peculiar decorations, the twinkling stained-glass lanterns, the half-boaty things, one labelled V and the other labelled B and realized he'd been looking at them for years but never actually seeing them. This day, for some reason he saw them, and he said to himself, now those are very weird things. No other bridge has anything like them. There must be a story here. So he went straight to the archives and found that indeed there was a story, and it was a good one. The lanterns commemorated WWI POWs, who kept themselves warm by lighting fires in barrels, and the boaty things represented the ships of George Vancouver and Harry Burrard, although as Davis harrumphed, Burrard never came within 5,000 km of this area. And no, the cozy-looking little buildings atop the arches never held exclusive apartments or sentries quarters; they merely cover up a bunch of unsightly steel girders. But yes, the odd tunnels in the piers underneath the car deck were intended to carry a second deck for a railroad, which was never built. Chuck wrote about his discoveries in his column in the Province and it went over so well he kept on researching and kept on writing. In the course of this he discovered two things about local history. One, it was just bristling with fascinating stories. Two, they were for the most part languishing unnoticed in the archives, just like his decoding of the Burrard Bridge.
As one of BC's most versatile and ubiquitous media figures, Chuck was well positioned to do something about this, and he dedicated the rest of his life to making us all aware of the rich treasury of stories contained in our own local past. He wrote 194 more columns revealing more hidden gems and added 18 books including three enormous reference works that would individually count as life works for many writers.
Sometimes he despaired. Once he was delivering a slide show to a class of grade four, five and six students and put up an image showing the statue of Captain George Vancouver, which stands in front of City Hall.
"Who can tell me who that man is?"; he asked.
One hundred voices shouted out with complete confidence, "George Washington!";
He wondered if this was some kind of an anomaly and made sure to ask the same question at every school he went to. Out of forty-nine schools he visited all over metropolitan Vancouver, only once did he encounter a student who could identify the man after whom Vancouver was named.
Experiences like this made Chuck wonder if anybody was listening, or if anyone cared. Fortunately he did live to have his mind put quite substantially to rest on that quarter. In the fall of 2010 when he made a public appeal for help to finish this last book after being diagnosed with three kinds of cancer (a trifecta, he wryly called it), the response was truly magnificent to see. Alan Twigg moved the awarding of the 2010 George Woodcock award ahead six months so Chuck could see his name recorded in the writers' walk of fame outside the VPL, an honour that moved him to tears. Donations poured in, the media was full of stories crediting Chuck for singlehandedly raising awareness in Greater Vancouver history and an army of admiring colleagues stepped forward to help finish the job of getting his magnum opus to press. Chuck was heard to say, "My gosh, if I'd known my dying would go over this well I would have done it sooner!";
One honour he did not live to see was perhaps the most important one and that was from the people of BC. When this book which Chuck described as the capstone of his writing career finally reached the stores in late November of 2011, the people he had sometimes worried were not paying attention to his message voted with their feet and flooded into the stores in unprecedented numbers, opened their wallets and bought out the entire print run in one week. Then they bought out the second print run in two weeks. Several veteran booksellers said The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver was the fastest-selling book large hardcover they'd ever seen. It sold over 10,000 copies in six weeks. Not only did this show beyond any doubt that BC people are interested in their own stories, at least when they're presented with style and humour and drama the way Chuck did, it shows something also of interest to those of us gathered here tonight, and that is that at this late date there is still tremendous support in this province for that wonderful artefact known as the printed book. Thank you Chuck, for reassuring us on that point, and thank you, BC booksellers for this recognition.
[by Howard White, May 12, 2012]
Submitted on May 14, 2012 in By David.
