Russell Eldon Chambers was born on November 13, 1938 at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria BC.

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Russell: My Growing Up Memories: Ladysmith and Victoria

We lived on 5 acres with a barn and a garage and an orchard with apple and cherry trees. There was a walnut tree as well. Next door was a grape farm which was owned by Grampa Mahle. This was a good source of grapes for us kids. The property backed onto crown land or at least I think it was crown land. Starks also had a welding shop next door to us.

Ladysmith was a logging town so we were loggers cutting down several large trees and bucking them up. We built a wagon and loaded the logs onto it and drove it down the old road to Holland Creek where we dumped them and floated them to salt water. I cannot remember if we were successful or not.

We used to play softball on the corner of the lot. There were many games mostly pickup games. There was a group of 6 or 8 of us ready to play at any time. We played a team from Chemainus I remember. The game was at the elementary school.

I remember my mother taking us down to Transfer Beach to go swimming very often. We also used to swim at Arcady where there was a log boom which made diving off the logs fun. I can also remember selling cherries on the side of the road at Arcady. I can remember riding my bicycle to go to Arcady and getting my skates caught in the front wheels and getting road rash on my face.

Down the road from where we lived was the garbage dump which was a fun place to play. Throwing rocks at the rats was a favorite past time. We would also get pieces of cardboard and slide down the dump.

One of the things I do remember is standing on the barn roof and throwing lighted matches off the roof. There were several other kids on the ground stamping out the flames. A few were missed and I can remember getting several yard sticks broken on my bare buttocks. I was the oldest so I was blamed for the whole incident.

A Few Other Memories from my Childhood:

The saddest day in my life was when Dad said we were moving. I can remember saying I was going to stay in Ladysmith. I had two paper routes and several wood and sawdust customers. I had more disposable money as a teenager than I have had since.

I got into a fight and broke my thumb. The fight was with David Declark who I am still in touch with today. I got a cast put on by Dr Cantor who was one of my lawn mowing customers.

The move was made and I was enrolled at University School. Because of my cast I did not participate in after school games. At the end of September Dad and I went to get the cast off. I can remember driving down the main street of Ladysmith and being very sad to think that I loved this place. It was a very sad trip. Cast came off and other than driving the old truck down to Madrona Farm I did not have much contact with people from Ladysmith.

I am on email with David Declark who still lives in Ladysmith. He worked at Harmac pulp mill and had the same job there as our friend Peter had in Port Alberni. Both mills are a lot different than they were then.

Life on Madrona Farm:

We were committed to two mornings of work on the weekends. This was on top of milking cows in the morning before our bicycle ride to St. Michael’s University school, many times in downpours.

We had compulsory games after school every day which ended about 4:30 pm I seem to remember. I learned to play rugby there and played a couple of games for the first team in Grade 10. I can remember going to St. Georges to play in Vancouver. I can remember getting lime on my shoulder (Note: Lime was used to line rugby pitches) and it became infected.

After two years at University school I enrolled in Victoria High School. I used to ride in with Gerry Andrews every morning and catch the bus home. I played rugby there as well. The big games were against Oak Bay called the Howard Russell Cup. We won in my Grade 11 year and tied in Grade 12.

We played St. Michael’s University School when I was at Victoria High. We beat them, and it was the first time a public school had beaten a private school at rugby in Victoria.

I had a good friendship with several guys from Vic High who lived in the Fairfield district of Victoria. Most of my Sunday afternoons were spent with them.

I can remember Dad being in the hospital and my having to look after all the milking and feeding of the cows. I can’t remember how long he was in the hospital for but it seemed like a long time.

I can also remember haying during my Grade 11 to 12 summer. We lost a good portion of the crop because of rain. Dad had warned me it was going to rain but I went to a lacrosse game and sure enough it started pouring later that night.

There were some memories of picking rocks off the hill that are hard to forget but it did build character.

Education and Early Career / Pre-Married Life Memories:

I went to Victoria College for three years. I quit the first year after three weeks and worked for the government and took a course on land surveying in Victoria. I played rugby for the Oak Bay Wanderers and took a year off school and worked as a surveyor from 1956-1957. 

 The following year I re-enrolled at Victoria College (1957-1958) taking sciences. I left my Chemistry exam to play in the first ever televised rugby game in British Columbia – I think I may have passed it. I only passed two courses and you had to pass three courses to get credits. So that summer I went to survey in Bella Coola, British Columbia. We drove to Campbell River and flew up to Bella Coola from there. I remember sitting on the Bella Coola wharf thinking “If they’d paid my way out of here right now I would have quit.” 

I spent the summer up there, back packing everything in and out. At the end of the season we had two days of work to do. One of the guys put an axe into his shin so he had to go back down to camp. I did what I had to do and then went to the other mountain to do what the injured surveyor was supposed to have done. We got up there and it clouded in and we decided to go back to our little base camp that we had at the tree line. Lo and behold, George the boss had sent two people up to tell us that we were going home. The problem was that the surveying instrument was up at 7200 feet – we had left it there because we thought we’d be going back up there. A couple days later we went back to get it. I remember that one of the guys suffered from hypothermia. We got back to the vehicle and went back to our main camp in Bella Coola. 

[INSERT PIC HERE OF BELLA COOLA CREW]

I went back to Victoria College and took first year courses again. I treated it like a job and all of a sudden got a bit smarter than I had been before. Then I transferred to the University of British Columbia for second year. I had to take first year English again. My professor’s name was Dick Clark and I was successful. I played rugby for the UBC Thunderbirds while I went to school there. I enrolled in Teacher Training after my second year. I failed the music part of the Teacher Training and had to turn my job down in Dawson Creek as a result. I went back to UBC and was successful at passing the music course and subsequently got a job in Fort St. John. 

Up to this point, I had never had a job interview. I got my surveying job from Jerry Andrews, I got my job at the City of Victoria through Norm Kowalyk, and got my job in Fort St. John because I was at a party with the Superintendent’s daughter who I spent 20 minutes talking to and Dave Todd (the Superintendent) came out of the joining hotel room and told me “You’ll receive your telegram on Monday and you’ve been hired to teach in Fort St. John.” 

The summer of 1963 I worked for the City of Victoria at Royal Athletic Park and then drove to Fort St. John in my grandfather’s 1948 Plymouth that he had brought over from Belgium. I started teaching in September 1963. 

I got a place right across the street from the school in Fort St. John and was in charge of making the coffee every morning at the school. I taught Physical Education and Social Studies, mainly. 

In the spring of 1964 we started a men’s rugby team in Fort St. John. On the May 24th long weekend we went to Calgary to play. On the team were six people who had played rugby before and nine who had never played. We were defeated narrowly by a Calgary team and on the Sunday of that weekend we beat a team that had not been beaten for two years. 

My time in Fort St. John was taken up coaching sports and teaching. We moved into a house in Fort. St. John and bought a deep freeze that took four of us to get down into the basement. I did most of the cooking and still meet once a year with many of the students I met there. One of the people I had a big effect on was John Grady, who spent many hours with Mary (my first wife) in the cancer clinic in Vancouver in 1980 when she was there for treatment. 

My final farewell to Fort St. John was the hosting of a rugby team from Edmonton. We won the game 6-3 and had a party at the Frontier Inn after the game which lasted until about 4:30 AM with the band still there. We had a 16 year old bartender who worked the bar that night. 

That summer before I moved to Kamloops I worked as a paving inspector for Little & Longstaff where my boss was Al Tuska. He had worked on the tunnel between Kemano and Kitimat and I think he was the Engineer in charge. 

In August 1966 I moved to Kamloops to start teaching at Kamloops Secondary School, where Jack McMillan from Fort St. John had moved the year before. The rest is history.