Headlines from the past: Writing history as it happens

In 2023, my former colleague at the Tri-City News, Diane Strandberg, launched a weekly history feature that could easily plug a hole in the back pages of the paper and generate some traffic to our website.
Headlines from the Past looks back at stories we’d covered in the publication’s 40 years.
When Strandberg retired in Sept., 2023, she asked if I wanted to continue the feature. I’d launched a similar retrospective series in the final years of the Burnaby and New Westminster NewsLeader before it was closed in 2015, so I enthusiastically picked up the mantle.
The stories aren’t just a fun opportunity to leaf through yellowing back issues of the paper and remember some of the stories I’d covered as a photographer, they’re also a reminder of the breadth of features and news we were able to bring to readers when we had the resources.
As well, they highlight the important role newspapers play in documenting change and evolution in their communities, along with some of the quirky and remarkable happenings.
Many thanks to the staff at Coquitlam Archives who’ve taken on the task of preserving back issues of the Tri-City News, as well as thousands of negatives and photos.
Here is a small collection of some of my favourite Headlines from the Past features.

Wild times come to an end at this notorious Port Coquitlam inn

For better or worse, the Wild Duck Inn was a local landmark.

Tucked next to the Lougheed Highway where it meets the Mary Hill Bypass in Port Coquitlam, the Tudor-style tavern was notorious for its exotic dancers and sometimes less-than-reputable customers. It was used to film a brutal rape scene in the 1988 Jodie Foster film, The Accused.

Other Hollywood stars who alighted its interior for various productions included Gwyneth Paltrow, Melissa Gilbert and Sean Penn, who scouted it as a potential set for a project he was working on with Jack Nicholson.

Using the money he’d made renting the facility to film crews, Kogler set out to reimagine The Wild Duck as an Irish pub and restaurant to be called Dublin Docks.

“We want to change the image of the pub,” Kogler told the Tri-City News, adding the makeover would honour his wife’s Irish heritage.

Instead of a brass pole atop a stage, Kogler said he planned theme nights and live music, as well as an upgraded menu.

“We’re going to get rid of the dancers,” he said. “We are missing 50 per cent of our population right now.”

By December, the last stripper had twirled around The Duck’s brass pole and many of its fixtures, like the giant map of Pitt Lake that had occupied a place of honour behind the bar for 20 years, were auctioned off.

In 2008 the pub was demolished to accommodate construction of the new Pitt River Bridge.

Circus tigers and elephants attract animal rights protesters to Coquitlam

The circus came to town in the summer of 1995.

So did animal rights protesters.

“The only exercise they get is when they perform,” a director of the Vancouver Humane Society told the Tri-City News, adding the animals are often chained or in cages, standing in their own feces and urine.

But a tiger keeper for the circus said its six big cats, plus two lions, are well-cared for.

“If this animal was mistreated, he would be cowering now,” Chris Kilpatrick said of one of the tigers lolling in a cage outside the arena.

“I’ve had this guy since he was a day old. He’s like a member of my family.”

Kilpatrick said the tigers travel and perform for five months of the year and get two days off a week. They spend the rest of their time at a ranch in southern California where the better-behaved cats are allowed to road free.

But the protesters said such assertions are little comfort.

They said they planned to lobby Coquitlam council to ban circus animals in the community and pressure operators to send them to sanctuaries to live out their lives.

“I’m convinced as more and more municipalities stop these shows, these facilities will be made available to animals,” said one.

Don’t mess with Port Moody’s repetition man (and woman)

A would-be thief might have been reconsidering his career and lifestyle choices after trying to abscond with some personal effects from a Port Moody gym in March, 1997.

The out-of-shape bandit faced several charges and his parole from a previous conviction was revoked after he was chased down by the owner of Gator’s Gym, Kai Heinonen, and one of its personal trainers, Monalee Blu.

The alleged thief was trying to get away with keys and a wallet he’d pilfered from Blu’s locker.

Blu had just finished an hour-long cardio workout when the incident occurred.

While Heinonen was tending to a prospective client who may actually have been a decoy, the suspect secreted into the locker room area, cut a lock and lifted Blu’s fanny pack that contained her car keys and wallet then left with his accomplice.

Blu noticed the theft immediately. She advised Heinonen. They saw her car was still parked out front, but with a stranger in the driver’s seat, trying to get it started.

Blu ran out to confront the thief, and when he tried to flee, she kneed him in the groin, causing him to drop the keys. As she went to pick them up, the suspect hightailed it on foot.

Heinonen, who was watching the scene play out from inside the gym, immediately gave chase, joined by Blu.

They quickly caught their winded quarry and pinned him to the ground until police arrived.

“If I had to chase him to Timbuktu, I would have,” Blu told the Tri-City News.

“It was pretty wild,” said Heinonen.

Fundraiser for Port Moody hospice project turns the tables on beauty pageants

Stuffing slices of pizza and drinking beer may not be a part of the training regimen for most pageant contestants.

But the seven local businessmen vying to be named “Mr. Millennium” were doing their best to increase their girth — er, worth — prior to the unique fundraiser event for the Crossroads Hospice Society, which, in 2000, was in the planning stages for construction of its new $1.5 million-facility near Port Moody’s Eagle Ridge Hospital.

The contestants — three of them single — would compete in fashion modelling, beach and formal wear, impromptu questioning and talent, with the winner representing Crossroads at local functions through 2001.

“The guys are really excited about this,” said Linda Kozina, Crossroads’ executive director.

“They’re training to get in shape. And we’ve already got a waiting list for next year’s pageant.”

The commuter ferry service from Port Moody to Vancouver that didn’t last a month

Long before SkyTrain and West Coast Express carried commuters from the Tri-Cities into Vancouver, the owners of a 60-foot tunnel-hulled ship called Pride of Vancouver were getting ready to launch their own private service.

James MacMillan and Vancouver doctor William Chan proposed twice daily sailings between the pier at Port Moody’s Rocky Point Park and the SeaBus terminal. The 55-minute journeys would depart at 7 a.m. in the morning and return for Port Moody at 5:30 p.m. The trips would cost $4.50 each way, or $165 for a monthly pass.

In a presentation to Port Moody council, MacMillan said the service needed 50 passengers each way to break even, but he hoped to attract up to 150. He said he planned to launch on Jan. 24, 1994.

But some councillors weren’t so keen on passing a bylaw that would grant the Pride of Vancouver permission to use the pier and set docking fees for the craft and parking rates for passengers. They were concerned the commercial enterprise wouldn’t be an appropriate use for the public park.

Others — led by then-Mayor John Northey — said the effort to provide an alternative way for commuters to get to Vancouver and ease traffic congestion was laudable and worth granting the company use of the facility for a trial run lasting into May.

The bylaw ultimately passed on Jan. 24, and a week later the ship had its maiden commuter voyage with only 12 passengers and a contingent of reporters, photographers and camera operators from several media outlets.

Slowed by an incoming tide, the craft arrived in Vancouver 16 minutes late.

It may have been an ominous omen.

A week later MacMillan was offering free rides and adjusting his schedule to get passengers into Vancouver and back to Port Moody earlier.

“Everybody has said our times are wrong,” he told the Tri-City News.

But even those adjustments weren’t enticing enough to get commuters out of their cars.

MacMillan lowered the fare to $3.50 each way and even threw in a free B.C. Transit transfer in an effort to build traffic.

Less than a month after it launched, though, the commuter ferry service was sunk.

Its last voyage carried 26 passengers — more than the average load of seven a sailing it carried in its final week, but far less than the craft’s capacity of 200.