When the village of Cranberry Lake amalgamated with Wildwood, Townsite and Westview in 1954, many of the area’s residents were worried the move would only bog them down.
“We had everything we needed right here,” recalled long-time resident Al McKenzie. “Everything was very self-sufficient.”
His father Archie thought so too. As chairman of the amalgamation investigation committee 60 years ago, he voted against the idea, maintaining that Cranberry was “sitting pretty” just as it was. In an ironic twist, it was he who had the bittersweet duty of chairing the final meeting of Cranberry’s council just a few weeks later.
While the neighbourhood may have lost many of its iconic businesses, buildings and residents in the decades since that day, it hasn’t lost its identity. A unique flavour and character still exists in the area. Storefronts are filling back up, new residents are moving in and Cranberry’s pride remains very much intact.
“I drove through there the other day and I was really heartened to see the street with a lot of cars parked at what has now become Magpie’s,” said former Powell River mayor Stewart Alsgard. “I looked inside and the place looked full and there were some chairs outside and I thought, that looks like Wilshire’s used to be a thousand years ago.”
Alsgard grew up in a house across the street, right next to his father’s Town Crier newspaper office. In those days, he’d visit Sid Wilshire’s confectionary shop as often as he could. “That, of course, was the mecca for everybody in the village,” he said. “You pooled your five-cent weekly allowance and you bought the biggest sort of thing you could get.”
Katherine Ray purchased the Wilshire’s building 10 years ago, along with a row of others that stand southeast of it. By that time, Cranberry wasn’t quite as Alsgard remembers it. “They used to call it Crimeberry when we first moved here,” Ray recalled. “I joined the ratepayers’ [association] and someone actually said at that first meeting that they were scared to walk down the street where we owned our property...because it [was] so dark and seem[ed] sinister.”
Ray took the comment to heart and soon set to work painting over graffiti and adding colour to the block. “I wanted to brighten up Cranberry, to revive this cute, wonderful little community,” she said.
Somewhere in the process of doing so, she became one of the neighbourhood’s biggest modern-day proponents, even taking the reins of Cranberry Days for a number of years. The biennial village reunion, which first took place in 1967, is currently on hiatus but will make a return to Lindsay Park in 2015. “I’m thinking May or September,” she said.
Just up the hill, Cranberry Seniors’ Centre has been the site of many reunions as well. Since 2006, Senior Citizens Association Branch 49 (Powell River) has called the corner of Manson Avenue and Cranberry Street home. The club boasts over 250 current members, many of whom grew up near by. One even lived in a house where the centre now stands, on what used to be the Bernier Block of Cranberry Street.
“My dad had two stores there,” recalled Vivian Calder, née Bernier, who moved to Powell River with her family in 1926. “He had Bernier’s shoe store...and then another store that we used to rent out.”
Even the centre’s sign, which McKenzie designed and built by hand, triggers memories for many. “It’s installed on the very corner where my mother, Ethel McKenzie, had a ladies’ wear store called the Corner Shop in the ’50s,” he explained.
Cranberry was home to dozens of vibrant businesses back then, and over 1,500 residents to support them. There were two trucking companies, two garages, a hardware store, a post office, a print shop, a butcher, and an indoor roller rink. “We had two bakeries up there, for heaven’s sake,” said Alsgard. “The old Caledonian Bakery and the Avenue Bakery. They were wonderful. You could stand outside looking gaunt, thin, starved to death and abused and you’d always get a cookie or a piece of pie.”
The village gas station, where the liquor store now stands, had the first computerized fuel pumps in town. Next door, at what is currently the Cranberry Motor Inn, was a bowling alley, pool hall and grocery store, all under one roof. “I had little after-school jobs there,” recalled Alsgard, who set pins in the lanes upstairs as a boy, returning a few years later to pack groceries on the ground level.
Further along Manson Avenue was the Bosa general store, later becoming Bosa and Mitchell and then Mitchell Brothers as it stands today. “You’d come up from Cranberry School and the big deal was to go in there with three or four of your mates, pool your change and buy what was called a Pep-Chew,” he said.
Cars were few and far between, with many residents and millworkers using buses to get around. “Four or five separate numbered routes, if you can believe it,” Alsgard remembered. “It just shows you how high the volume was…you could pick up a bus every 15 or 20 minutes there.”
Half a century later, while Alsgard was in office, the transit system was due for an overhaul. By that time, the area was known simply as Cranberry and not Cranberry Lake, the name it first incorporated under in 1942: “I said, you know, we should go back to the original names.” The ratepayers’ association agreed with the mayor’s idea and bus schedules and signage were designed to reflect the change.
The lake itself is more than just a namesake, however. In the summer, its warm waters made it a favourite swimming hole for many who grew up near its shores. In the winter, people would come from all over to skate on its glassy surface. Today, a loyal population of water lilies manages to evade and beleaguer the ratepayers’ association regardless of the season. Ray and her fellow members have been exploring several solutions as of late.
“We, as a group, are really working towards beautifying Cranberry,” she said. “It’s like a wonderful little town. I always think of Powell River as a conglomerate of four towns more than a city the way that we’re described.”
In her own little conglomerate on Cranberry Street, Ray has one remaining storefront available: the former Cranberry Hardware store; built by one of Alsgard’s grandfathers, run by the other, and later sold to Tom Ahola. Although she’s received several rental offers, she’s been holding out for the perfect tenant. “I’m trying to do a really good match, like what’s going to go with a dog groomer, a barber shop, a little café,” she explained. “What comes next?”
“How about a hardware store?” suggested McKenzie, lamenting his frustration with now “having to drive all the way to Westview for a few nails.”
He might be onto something. History does have a way of repeating itself.
