I've mentioned before that Jim and I have loved and commented on this house beside our apartment building for as long as we can remember. And we couldn't resist taking the apartment three years ago that looked out over it.
Someone mentioned that the person who lived there was Barbara Lowy, the widow of Otto Lowy, the fellow who did "The Transcontinental" CBC Radio 2 broadcast. I had never listened to it but Jim was very familiar with the program and was very interested to talk to her about it so we had a really nice chat one day recently when we were coming back from a swim and she was in her garden. We learned that she had all the original tapes and transcripts since the CBC was going to destroy them all because of lack of storage space and also had a whole archive of his radio plays, talks, letters and all sorts of interesting stuff.
Otto Lowy just did an amazing amount of interesting things....from Wikipedia:
"Lowy was born in
Prague, Czechoslovakia to an assimilated Jewish family and was the only member of his immediate family to survive
World War II as he fled the country three days before Germany invaded. In England he worked as a member of the ground crew for the Czech Air Force squadron of the RAF. In 1948, he settled in
Vancouver, British Columbia and began his career with
CBC Radio, initially as an actor in the series
Adventures in Europe. He went on to write radio plays, make documentaries as well as act in dramas and comedies.
[1]He was one of the founders of Vancouver's
Arts Club Theatre in 1964."
Yesterday afternoon we were invited over to take a look and discuss ways of getting this wonderful archive in a library so it would be accessible to all. It was such a thrill to just enter this house that we had always admired and what a place of memorabilia and Barbara is a real character and a warm welcoming person with lots of funny anecdotes...she should write a book! Her son was there as well (who lives in the house behind her house) and he took a year off a while ago to organize the archive and transcribe all the tapes into MP3 and all the transcripts and other documents into PDF so this amazing archive is all in digital form.
All very exciting and Jim is looking forward to working with the materials himself and helping to get them a good home.
Hallway filled with photo of productions he was involved in.
Jim and David looking over the archive.
Barbara with a photo of Otto interviewing Vera Lynn
The table where Otto did all his work. Barbara told us a funny story about how there was a hot dog stand here and they were very bothered by cars blocking traffic, parking in their driveway, the smell, the garbage created, etc. There had been one of the popcorn vendors here but that was when it was four lanes. Now there wasn't any place to park but people stopped anyway. They went to city hall and Otto made an elegant speech about how David Oppenheimer had to look over this unfortunate spectacle as well. There is a statue of Oppenheimer (the second and very important mayor of Vancouver) just a few paces away. They won the day and the hot dog stand was gone.
Looking forward to many more visits and stories!
