Biography of James Evan Love

I can say that I knew my Dad, James Evan Love, pretty well. As I became my own man, it wasn’t easy loving him, but I was loyal to him through his worst health problems and our family’s most difficult times. He trusted me.

Near the end of his life, it become as much a friendship between two men as it was between a father and a son.

But there was a lot about his past and his nature that I never knew – things I’d learn about later which would change my image of him.

He was a complex and contradictory person with many layers. He could be plain-spoken and straight-forward when he wanted to make a point, and he could be evasive or defensive when his ego or authority were threatened.

As a young kid, I saw my Dad as brave and heroic – a tough guy with equal shades of John Wayne and Gregory Peck. He could also be soft-hearted and amiable, kind of like a Canadian Andy Griffith. Sometimes, he could also be dark and bitter, a drunken and nasty equivalent of Oliver Reed or Richard Burton. There were many sides to him. (Apparently, I can only categorize these aspects of his personality using characters from TV and movies. Go figure.)

My Dad was a very intelligent man and he knew it. I’m sure it must have gone to his head on occasion, but it was also part of his immense personal sense of pride.

So, those are my reflective comments as one of his sons. The rest of this is more of a straight-up biography of his life, as I’ve learned it.

Early years in Prince Rupert

James Evan Love was born in Prince Rupert, BC in October 1921. He had a sister named Pat, and three brothers: Bruce, the eldest, and Eric and Charles, who were younger than him. They all lived in a house built by their father, which still stands today.

Dad was born October 18, 1921, and grew up during the great depression as part of a proud, working class family. Dad’s Father, Albert Bruce Love, was born in Summerside, PEI and worked as a cable splicer for the Prince Rupert Telephone Company. Dad’s mother Margaret (Owens) ran the household and kept the reins on four boys and one girl. Margaret was a kind and gentle woman – hard working and selfless by nature. She was been born in Cumbria, Northumberland, UK, near modern-day Newcastle. Margaret’s younger sister Marion (“Molly”) was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and came to live with Margaret and her family while the my Dad and his siblings were still quite young.

Dad hit his adolescence during the depression of the 1930s, and whenever I heard his childhood stories, that fact fascinated me. I’d always wanted to know what it was like to live during a tough time like that. It was all history to me, and I thought my Dad had lived right in the middle of it.

He told me stories of the kinds of things he got into as a kid back in the day: Evan (as he was known in his early years) and his brothers and friends would go to the docks and scavenge all the fish heads they could carry from local fishermen. His mother would carve the cheeks out of the heads and make fish soup. Sometimes, the kids would go picking berries, talking to the local farmers and getting samples from their gardens to take home.

Dad once described chewing wax when he couldn’t get gum as a kid, and at 12 years old rolling his own cigarettes. Filter-tipped cigarettes (“Saturday Night Specials”, as he called them) were too expensive.

In his early teens, he had a route delivering newspapers all over Prince Rupert. I’ve imagined him as a kid on his bike, clattering up muddy hills and down gravelly roads, flinging papers onto people’s porches and outrunning their dogs.

I think my Dad must have liked going to the movies when he was young. He told me that his matinee idols included adventure heroes like Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, and Tyrone Power.

I don’t think Dad got past Grade 10 in high school, but by that time he was probably more interested in getting steady work and earning his own money. Maybe he’d developed a young man’s taste for adventure, or maybe he thought he was ready to look outside his hometown for new opportunities. He might have had aspirations to be a journalist – an adventurous occupation if you were someone like Ernest Hemingway. According to Dad’s army records, he even signed up for a correspondence course with a journalism school.

In 1938 at the age of 17, Evan and one of his brothers went to Dawson City looking for work – or adventure. Apparently, they worked on “Dredge #4” for some mining company, although I don’t recall much mention of actual work in my Dad’s Dawson City memories of working in a mining camp – just colourful, adventurous stories. Dad said that someone told him that you know you’re a man in the north when you’ve “seen the ice come in, seen the ice go out, shot a bear, and slept with a squaw”. He said he’d done three of the four.

Later in his life, he was still getting good mileage out of his memories, telling some of the staff in his care home that during his young mining adventure, he’d learned to play a card game called Pangini which used multiple decks of cards. He gave the impression of having been a bit of a card shark.

In Vancouver in 1945, James enlisted in the Canadian Army. He served for just over a year, from 1945-46, during which he was posted at Camp Borden in Ontario, and a number of other locations in the lower mainland of British Columbia.

He joined the Provost Corps, becoming a Military Policeman and was granted rank of Lance Corporal. At the end of his service, he was awarded the Canadian Voluntary Service Medal.

Years later, he enlisted in the RCAF where he became a Corporal and Radar Technician between 1951-56.

Later in 1956, he started working as an Engineer at CHEK-TV in Victoria, BC. A CHEK-TV company film recorded the day a transmitter was brought into the building, and I saw that mt Dad was one of the men carrying it in.

His start in the early days of television broadcasting in Victoria is commemorated with a lighter given to him as a gift from the management of CHEK-TV.

CHEK-TV is also where he met his second wife, Angela Clarke. In 1961, they were married in Victoria, and a few years later, Jim took a job as Chief Engineer at CFQC-TV in Saskatoon. His new job included buying all new colour studio camera and video equipment and later, outfitting a mobile colour recording truck as well. To him, at the time, this was the high-point of his career – he was, as he put it, “in his “glory”.

Unfortunately, Angela was badly injured in a house fire, suffering severe burns to her arms and face. Skin grafts were taken from her stomach to repair her arms. Her healing was slow and difficult, but by 1964, she was home in bandages trying to return to a normal life.

In 1966, her son Ernest John was born, and in 1968 they were blessed again with their daughter, Kimberley Anne.

In 1972, James took a new job as Chief Engineer at CJJC-AM Radio in Langley, BC. He counted among his friends at CJJC on-air personalities like Elmer Tippe, and members of the staff and management. During this time, his family’s home was a mobile home on the station’s 77 acre transmitter site. This provided him with an easy commute and his children with an endless natural playground to explore, but it was also isolated and lonely for his wife Angela, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1973.

By 1974, his family was back in Victoria, living with Angela’s father. Jim struggled to find employment for most of a year, but in 1975, he accepted a new job at the TRIUMF Research facility at UBC and finally brought the family across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver.

In 1977, Angela overdosed on alcohol and suffered mild brain damage and permanent hospitalization. After that, she lived in a succession of private hospitals until she went to long-term care in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, around 1980 or 1981.

Jim worked at TRIUMF until he retired in 1983, after having a heart attack and multiple strokes. He was 62.

After returning home in 1984, Jim and his son John relocated to a small apartment in downtown Vancouver. Jim walked with a cane by this time, but remained fairly self-sufficient around his home and neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, James suffered another minor stroke and while recuperating in hospital, fell and broke his hip. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, a private care home in Burnaby. In 1986, he gave his daughter away when Kimberley married Michael. In 1989, he attended his son’s wedding to Grace, and saw his wife Angela and his aunt Molly for the first time in a dozen years.

Jim passed away in November of 1984, after a difficult bout with pneumonia. He was 68.

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