“My dad’s side of the family was in logging. My mom lived in Cumberland and it was really her family that was involved in mining.

My cousin delivered the coal that came out of the mines. Mom and I went to the museum when they were first got it going.

There was a huge list of miners on the wall in the Cumberland Museum and I said, ‘well mom, dad’s name is not on there.’’ We asked why, and were told that the company did not like the amount of deaths that happened in the mines, so if they did not have to add another one to the list they did not.

“I grew up listening to stories about the miners and the community and the spirit of the people, as well as the ethnic communities. If you ever watched anything on the gold rush days it was a really booming community, with a huge assortment of people and it was the place to be. I was born in Comox, lived in Courtenay, and then moved to Campbell River in 1947. My uncle lived in Cumberland; he drove the buses and the crummies. My mom used to go to Cumberland to get a perm; my aunt had a salon there and we would sit for hours and listen to the people. We, as kids, used to go and spend the whole day there. Mom’s father died when she was four and her mother continued on with the restaurant. About two and a half years later she sold the restaurant and moved into Courtenay and had a rooming house and store on Fifth Street, right by the bridge.

“The building that housed the Cumberland Restaurant is still there but I do not know which part it was in; they have changed the store fronts so much. Many people remark on the amount of hotels and beer parlors in Cumberland but they do not have any idea of the number of people who were there, and what a big community it really was. Most of the housing was in the flats and Chinatown was there too. Union Bay also had a large Chinese community.

“The wharf in Union Bay was huge and you could hear the work going on there all day long. My grandmother decided to open a hotel in Union Bay because of the coal and the shipping boom. Beer was ten cents a glass and a liquor license was 125 dollars a year. My mother’s mother passed away in the spring of 1938 when mom was eighteen. She was not legally old enough to run her own bar but as the only child, it was her responsibility to run the hotel. Liquor accounted for a large portion of the business, so she hired a bartender. This was the place to be; the sailors would go there for home cooked meals.

“When Mom got older she had quite a large house. Monday was always wash day so she would do the laundry and hang it all over the living room, the wood fire would help dry the clothes. My sister would say, ‘mom, you have your laundry all over the house,’ and mom told her ‘yes, but it will be dry in half an hour!’ I remember one time when I was talking to mom; she was telling me about when she was a young girl in the hotel. In the winter, they had to do the laundry after the bar closed because there were no dryers and you could not put it outside. They would put all the sheets and bedspreads and things from the hotel over the tables in the bar and they would have to get up early to get everything out of there.

“They had a pretty steady clientele from the letters and cards they got from the guys on the ships in the North Sea. It was a very busy port. The sailors kept in contact with us because of the fact that the hotel was home for a lot of them. My mom went to boarding school at St. Ann’s in Nanaimo when she was little and came home at Christmas and she helped wrap gifts. The men got cigars and the women got hankies.

“My great grandparents came here from England and had seventeen children; he worked in the mines and lost his sight. He used to take the horse to deliver the milk, and the dog would stop the horse at the houses that he needed to stop at. Those are the kind of stories that happen but they do not get told anymore; most people would never believe them.”

Pat and her family stay true to her roots with several businesses.  She keeps herself busy with her work and family.