Page 10 of the Vancouver Daily Province from March 27, 1915.
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May 09, 2022 - 6:00 AM
Before smartphones came along, the public relied heavily upon newspapers to learn about the province’s most culturally significant events – like winning the Stanley Cup in Vancouver, the struggles of the 1930s before the term “Great Depression” was coined, and the investigation into a notorious serial killer.
Now there's a website that makes it incredibly easy to look up those fascinating stories from yesteryear, with over a century of issues from The Province, The Times Colonist and the Vancouver Sun. They've all been loaded to ProQuest, in cooperation with the B.C. Electronic Library Network, B.C. Libraries Cooperative and Focused Education Resources.
The search bar and time range are handy for getting specific. The newspaper records go as far back as 1884, but recent issues can only be found up to 2010.
Sports fans may recall Vancouver won the Stanley Cup in 2015. However, the city’s hockey team was called the Vancouver Millionaires back then.
In the final round of that year's playoffs, the Millionaires defeated the Ottawa Senators three games to none in a best-of-five series. Winning the Stanley Cup may seem like a big deal nowadays, but it wasn’t front-page news in 1915 – the story was published on Page 10 of the Province. The front page of that day's newspaper was full of articles relating to the ongoing First World War, although it was not referred to as the First World War at the time.
In 1915, an ammo company advertised that it is sound logic to teach every schoolboy to shoot.
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Old newspapers printed content that would become staples in modern history, not just locally but nationally and internationally. Like columnists of the early 1920s who tried to explain jazz music to their readers by calling it "musical champaign which quickens the pulse, brings joyous thoughts uppermost, and makes the world seem a much better place." And the journalists of 1931 who covered the tax evasion trial of Al Capone, calling the mob boss a reckless spender and big gambler who "was either too dumb or unable to” navigate the economic downturn of the day.
READ MORE: Last two daily newspapers in Okanagan will now be printed in Vancouver
Around the same time in B.C., the Great Depression caused a Merritt logging company to fall deep into debt. The company had the financial backing of the city, and when it defaulted on $125,000 worth of debt, the province took over Merritt's municipal government for 18 years.
Some of the most impactful headlines of the golden era of newspapers were printed on May 8, 1945 – Victory in Europe Day. When readers learned that Hitler had been defeated and the Nazis had surrendered, it became apparent that the Allied Forces had won the Second World War.
For those British Columbian readers who lived through six years of war, it must have been satisfying to see the headline “Germans lay down their arms,” on the cover of that day’s Vancouver Daily Province.
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“…the British people saved themselves and their island and so won the war,” reads an article which was reprinted from the London Times.
Since the 21st Century, one of the biggest crime stories to come out B.C. was the investigation into serial killer Robert Pickton.
He wasn’t convicted until 2007, but while he was still only a “person of interest” to the RCMP, the Feb. 8, 2002 Vancouver Sun’s front page read “Search of pig farm yields missing woman’s ID.”
Although Pickton was not in police custody at the time, the Sun was able to fill several pages about the suspicions surrounding him.
The back issues stop in 2010 – so records of the notorious Stanley Cup riot of 2011 in Vancouver just missed the cut.
"All kinds of tedium may be relieved by a good smoke," according to this cigarette ad from 1915.
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