Walking tours season may be coming to an end, but we’ll be offering two weeks of fam tours for any interested Whistler business or organization starting today! If you’ve ever wished you could answer a customer’s questions about Whistler history (we often get asked if the Whistler Village was built for the 2010 Olympics), this tour might just be for you!
If you’ve every tried to make a cake that looks like something other than a cake, you’ve probably discovered that it’s not always that easy to do. The idea of creating a cake that looks like a specific geological form may seem intimidating, but in 1980 that was just what contestants in the Fall Fair Mountain Cake Bake contest were asked to do.
The Alta Lake Community Club’s (ALCC) Fall Fair was first held in the Myrtle Philip School gym in 1977. The ALCC had “reactivated” itself in 1976 after a four year hiatus and began supporting adult education classes, a Brownies group, dances and children’s parties. In May of 1977 they began planning a Fall Fair to be held in November in partnership with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club’s Ski Swap. The Fair was a fundraiser for the ALCC and featured a cafe in the lunchroom, handmade crafts, a white elephant gift exchange, a raffle, and even a ski demonstration. This first Fair made a profit and the ALCC began planning a slightly larger fair for the following year.
The Fall Fair continued to be held in the school gym and over time additions were made. The ALCC began appointing members to organize the event, one of the club’s main fundraisers. The 1980 Fall Fair would appear to have been a particularly successful year.
On November 22, 1980, Myrtle Philip School might have the most bustling place in Whistler. In addition to the Mountain Cake Bake contest, that year’s Fair included stalls selling various crafts, a bale sale stall contributed to by various community members, a rummage sale coordinated by Viv Jennings, and the Port Moody High School Stage band, featuring Whistler regular Mark MacLaurin on trumpet. For $1 attendees could also buy a raffle ticket and be entered to win prizes including a Whistler Mountain Season Pass, a Blackcomb Mountain Season Pass, and two children’s passes for Ski Rainbow on Rainbow Mountain.
A month before the Fall Fair, an article was published in the Whistler Question outlining the rules and regulations of the Mountain Cake Bake competition. Written by Cathy Jewett, it included a (unsubstantiated) history of mountain cake baking in the area, supposedly begun by none other than Myrtle Philip who was said to have created a cherry-flavoured replica of Rainbow Mountain, inspiring the formation of the Mountain Cake Baking Society. The rules of the competition were fairly simple: cakes had to be at the Fall Fair no later than 10:30 am and had to taste good while resembling a local mountain. That evening the winning cake would be consumed while the runners-up were to be auctioned off. Though there is no mention of what first prize consisted of, all entrants were eligible for dinner at Beau’s. To get potential entrants thinking, Jewett offered suggestions such as “a Mount Brew Beer Cake, Sproat Mountain carved out of alfalfa cake, a licorice flavoured Black Tusk,” and more.
The 1980 Fall Fair was described in the ALCC minutes as a “financial success.” The prize for the Mountain Cake Bake was awarded to Debbie Cook and her sister Karen, who submitted a model of Diamond Head that was said to be “pleasing both to the eye and the palate.” It was also a success for Norman Dedeluk, Sid Young, Ross Cameron and Moira Biggin-Pound who all won various seasons passes in the raffle.
1980 appears to be the only year the Mountain Cake Bake competition took place, as there is no other mention of it in the ALCC meetings, but if you would like to share your own experiences trying to recreate Whistler’s landscape out of cake, let us know at the Whistler Museum.
Throughout 2018, the Whistler Museum’s blog, Whistorical, published a weekly feature called “This Week in Photos” (find all the posts here). We had recently finished scanning the Whistler Question collection of photos from 1978 to 1985 and used the photos (which were helpfully arranged by their week of publication) to illustrate what was happening in Whistler in a particular week for each year the collection covered. Most photos that had been published in the paper were catalogued with captions that helped provide context but for some photos you need to go to copies of the Question to understand what’s pictured. One such photo can be seen here:
The image of a protest in front of a partially constructed Town Centre was published in the week of September 11, 1980 but the story behind it can be found in the Question throughout that year. The first report of tensions around Town Centre construction projects in found in an editorial from June 5, 1980. The dispute was mainly over whether the Town Centre was considered an integrated site, allowing both union and non-union workers to work on the different parcels, or a common site, allowing the Town Centre developers to employ only union workers. There were four parcels being built by non-union contractors at the time.
The Labour Relations Board (LRB) had been asked to make a decision on the matter. On June 11, the Whistler Contractors Association (WCA), headed by Doug O’Mara, attended the talks with a letter from Mayor Pat Carleton and the rest of Council expressing a desire to keep the Town Centre as an integrated site, allowing the independent contractors of the WCA to continue working there.
The LRB chose not to make a ruling at that time and construction of the Town Centre by both union and non-union workers continued over the summer, though there was still tension.
Over the August long weekend the unions did stop work for a day, leading to what the Question described as “an extra long weekend.” However, the Question editorial staff were confident enough that the construction season would end without a major disruption that they published an editorial on August 21 thanking those who had kept the Town Centre moving and claiming “we’re fairly confident that the relative harmony that has existed over the area for the summer will extend into the fall.” One week later, on August 28, approximately 200 union workers walked off the Town Centre site. This action began another hearing of the LRB beginning September 3.
The rally pictured was quickly organized by the WCA and took place on September 4. Over 300 people turned out to support the WCA and signed a petition to be taken to the LRB. The rally also attracted media attention and interviews with O’Mara, Nancy Greene, and other contractors were aired on CBC and CKVU and featured on the front page of the Province.
The talks with the LRB continued for almost two weeks while the remaining construction season got shorter. On September 15, the LRB announced that they needed to investigate the issue further and would send two officials to Whistler. In the meantime, the Town Centre was to be treated as an integrated site.
Work resumed on the Town Centre over the next week, just in time for the Premier and Cabinet to visit, but the dispute did not end there. The LRB announced on December 2 that, effective January 1, 1981, the Town Centre would be considered a common site, excluding the Whistler Golf Course and work on Blackcomb Mountain, which opened just two days later. The WCA stated that they would appeal the decision, but Mayor Carleton was not hopeful the decision would be reversed.
Though looking through the Question doesn’t always provide the whole story behind a photograph, it often helps provide some context.
With the beginning of a new (though uncertain) school year, we thought we’d take a look back at the first school built in the Whistler valley and one of its teachers. The Alta Lake School was built in 1931 and operated until 1946, when it closed due to an insufficient number of students. It reopened in a new building in 1956 but continued to struggle with enrolment.
Mel Carrico was born in Alberta and after the war he and his wife Dagmar decided to raise their family in British Columbia. Though trained as a teacher, Carrico worked for Alcan in Kitimat and the Department of Labour in Smithers through the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1958 he returned to the classroom, teaching first in the one room schoolhouse in Garibaldi and then becoming the teacher at the one room schoolhouse at Alta Lake.
According to an oral history interview with Rob Carrico, Mel’s son, his father was asked during his interview with Don Ross, then the head of the school board, how many school aged children he had, as four were needed to reopen the Alta Lake School. There were technically three potential Carrico students, but Rob’s younger sister was put into Grade One at the age of five to make up the numbers and Mel Carrico was hired.
The family spent two years living near the school at Alta Lake. Looking back, Rob said his only regret about his time there was that there were no other boys around his age and he had wanted to be a Cub Scout. Most of the students came from families employed by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. No matter their age, all students learned in the same classroom. Rob remembered that, “It was always interesting because you could listen in on all the lessons.” If the Grade Three lesson was not too exciting, the Grade Five lesson might have been more intriguing.
According to Rob, Alta Lake was “a good place to go to school,” partly because of the nearby creek where one could go at recess to catch Kokanee. Each year his father ensured that the school put on a big Christmas concert, usually including a puppet show. The students would help to make marionettes and a stage would be constructed at the school. The concert was a big event for the small Alta Lake community.
Rob remembered the community as close-knit, where neighbours would look after each other, visiting often and coming together for bingo and other events, such as the Ice-Break Raffle and the summer fish derby (which he thought might have just been an excuse to gather a lot of fish and have a big community fish fry).
The Carricos left Alta Lake in 1961 when Rob’s elder sister reached high school. The Alta Lake School did not teach higher grades and so she would have had to leave her family and attend school in Squamish while being boarded. Instead, the entire family moved to Squamish and Mel Carrico continued to teach in the school district. He eventually retired as the principal of Mamquam Elementary School.