Interview with the author
by JONATHAN KERSLAKE
LILLOOET NEWS
Thorne’s recollections column, all grown up
Reprinted with permission.
New book
soon available
Long-time readers of the BRLN will be familiar with the name Terry Thorne from his column Recollections of a Kid, which ran once a month from 2018 until early 2022.
Thorne’s column – a series of literary snapshots looking back at his life as a young person in Lillooet between 1947 and 1961 – received what he described as a “very positive” response from the community. Because of which – as well as some strenuous encouragement from his wife Sherrie and sister Wendy Fraser (who also edited the BRLN for many years) – Thorne decided to expand on his recollections and gather them into a book.
Growing Up Lillooet is expected to be available through Amazon, either in paperback or as an e-book, by the end of January. The BRLN recently reached Thorne by phone at his home in the Fraser Valley to talk about the book.
BRLN: So, “Growing Up Lillooet” is your second book, I guess?
TT: Yes. The first one would make a good doorstop, or if you ever have a car with wonky brakes and park on a hill, that sucker would do real good just jammed against the back wheel.
It was my life story… it weighed four-and-a-half pounds…but it was just for family members.
BRLN: What can readers expect from this new book? Is it similarly weighty?
TT: It’s considerably more manageable. It’s roughly 280 pages long. I should point out – and this is no reflection on my sister Wendy who edited the book – but I had stories and stories and more stories. But Wendy, as the editor, and my wife as her assistant, they hacked and whacked away at it, and I was really starting to get concerned that I’d end up with nothing more than a plump pamphlet!
But in a big way, I’m glad they did – I really believe it’s a better book because of it.
At the back of the book, we have a selection called: Community Snapshots. Who was elected to council; fires; floods; car accidents. Just hard facts – things that happened to the community – as gleaned from the archives of the Lillooet News, separate from recollections and memories of growing up in Lillooet. And there are 90-100 photographs, dispersed throughout the book.
BRLN: You’ve said it’s going to be available on Amazon, but will there be some copies that might end up on the shelf at Buy Low, or at KC Health, as well?
TT: We sure hope so. We’re still kicking this around, but there will be some type of wholesale distribution.
I’d love to have it in Buy Low, or in Karen‘s place at KC, or wherever.
BRLN: How would you say Lillooet has changed between your remembrance of it as a child and the last time you visited?
TT: When we moved here (from Squamish in 1947), I saw it through the eyes of a kid. It was just a fantastic place to grow up. We didn’t have any television; radio reception – at best – was spotty; our playgrounds were the hillside and climbing up to Red Rock or hitching out to Seton Lake on the gas car, or down on the river. It was everything outdoors – we would play until someone rang a dinner bill, or Mom came out on the back porch and called to me, and I didn’t hear; but some lady in the next block would hear, and: “Terry, you’ve got to go home…” You know: the back porch telegraph. That got us in, reluctantly, when it got too dark to play scrub-ball or whatever.
And the winters were fantastic.
These are the sorts of things I’ve captured in the book: what it was like, in those days, to grow up in a small community like that.
You will find I tried to marry what it was like growing up, for me and my buddies, with the things that were happening to the town at the same time.
We had access to the Bridge River Lillooet News archive, and we took a picture of the first page of virtually every newspaper from January 1950 to early 1962, after I had left…which was in November of 1961, about a month after my 18th birthday.
I knew I should really get beyond the mountains that surrounded me, growing up, so I hopped an overnight train from Lytton to Toronto, to go to college at DeVry Tech.
But the town has changed substantially. I don’t get back as often as I would like – maybe Growing Up Lillooet will bring me back a little more often. The town has grown. Much of the growth has been outside the village boundaries – up at what we called the Hop Farm.
BRLN: Was is still an actual hop farm when you lived here?
TT: When we moved here in ‘47, it was owned by a gentleman named Archdeacon Pugh…after he died, in 1950, the people who had leased the land from Archdeacon Pugh sold it to the Haas Hop Farm out of Chilliwack. From 1950 - up until the mid ’50s – they grew hops on that property.
BRLN: Are any of your old buddies still around, and are any of them still in Lillooet?
TT: Absolutely, they still are. Some of my closest friends growing up are still in Lillooet, or the Lillooet area.
My closest friend growing up – Wayne Angman – is still my closest friend to this day, though both of us are long gone from Lillooet. But Barry Peters is still there; Brian Duguid is still there; Kathy Arthur is still there… so I have lots of friends in Lillooet.
BRLN: Did you find, during the process of discussing the stories with your old friends, that you learned things you had forgotten, or realized you remembered differently?
TT: Certainly. But we have to remember that “Growing Up Lillooet” is my story…it’s the circumstances around my growing up at that time, as seen through my eyes. Others saw it differently, and rightly so.
BRLN: You described your motivation for writing the four-and-a-half-pounder as: for your family to be able to remember their stories. What would you say was your motivation for “Growing Up Lillooet?”
TT: To leave something of my time there, dedicated to present and past residents of Lillooet.
Just a glimpse into what it was like to live there at that time.
My mother was very active in the community – she was an alderwoman, and deputy mayor – and she taught us…that one of the obligations we have as individuals is to give back to the community to a greater degree than what you take from that community.
If we all did that – or if most of us did – we would have a better community for our group effort. I’ve always had that in the back of my mind.
