Burnaby NOW • Saturday, June 5, 2010 • 13
16 Wheel awareness
18 Lively City
26 Paper Postcards
SECTION COORDINATOR Jennifer Moreau, 604-444-3021 jmoreau@burnabynow.com
First down the slide at 80 Tony Neratini has lived in Burnaby for all of his 96 years. His memories provide a vivid picture of life in a much more rural community
HERE & NOW
Jennifer Moreau
Don’t miss this T great fest M
ark your calendars or you’ll miss one of Burnaby’s biggest annual fundraisers. The Wine, Food and Music Festival is on June 12, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $40, and partial proceeds go to the South Burnaby Neighbourhood House. The Rotary Club of Burnaby Metrotown and Metropolis at Metrotown are presenting the festival. I had the chance to attend a few years back, and I must say, it was quite an impressive spread. The festival is set up in a covered area next to the mall, by the SkyTrain station. Inside, there are booths with wine and food samples. The Burnaby Symphony Orchestra was playing, and in the casual setting, one could sit so close that the music completely enveloped the audience. They’ve switched up the entertainment a bit, and this year, a steel drum band will play. About 17 wineries and wine distributors have signed up so far, according to Antonia Beck from the South Burnaby Neighbourhood House. There is also a silent auction to help raise money for the cause. For tickets, call the neighbourhood house at 604-431-0400 or stop by the customer service desk at Metropolis at Metrotown.
A midsummer party
If Vikings and trolls are more your thing, the Scandinavian Midsummer Festival is coming up June 19 and 20. The yearly festival features Scandinavian-themed food, choirs, dance performances, cultural displays, a troll forest, carnival games, Icelandic horses (a breed of small, pony-like horses) a beer garden and more. One of the highlights is the Viking Village, where festivalgoers can see how Vikings lived, worked, played and traded. Inside the village, live the members of Reik Félag, a historical group focusing on the Viking Age from 1000 AD. There will also be a contest where men carry their wives in a race, and the team that finishes first gets the woman’s weight in Here Page 14
ony Neratini was the first one down the slide when the Eileen Dailly Leisure Pool first opened. He was 80 at the time. “I was spry back then,” Neratini says, laughing. Neratini, who turned 96 on May 17, has lived in North Burnaby his entire life. He was given the honour of being the first to try out the new corkscrew slide because he had visited the building site daily, telling city workers about the history of the location. When they started digging, city crews couldn’t understand why they weren’t hitting hardpan – a dense layer beneath the topsoil LIFE STORIES – Neratini says. Janaya Fuller-Evans “I told them, you won’t find hardpan there, that used to be a lake,” he says in an interview in his home. While it was not on city records, Neratini remembers swimming in the lake at the site, now 240 Willingdon Ave., as a boy. He told the city planners the lake had been filled with gravel long ago. Neratini grew up on Hastings Street when it was just a dirt road dotted with a few houses and businesses, surrounded by bush. Born at 4319 Hastings St. – now the site of the Vogue Hair Studio – Neratini worked for a butcher on the same street as a boy. His parents immigrated from Italy in 1911, he says, and his father worked for the municipality of Burnaby. He became a butcher, and met his wife at the shop where he worked. “I was working in a butcher shop up on Hastings Street (and Nanaimo Street) for $16 a week, working 60-hour weeks,” Neratini says. His wife, Rose Neratini, was one of seven children. Her father owned a print shop near the cenotaph on Hastings Street. One morning, while he was driving to work, a tram hit the driver’s side of his car and drove his pipe into his throat, killing him. Rose’s brothers and sisters were put into foster care while Rose, who was 18, Larry Wright/burnaby now went to live with a local family and take Watching the city change: Tony Neratini, who has lived in North Burnaby for 96 care of their son, Bobby. years, stands in the front yard of his home on Lochdale Street. The longtime resident She shopped at another butcher shop says he’s happy about the way the city has grown and changed. near Neratini’s workplace. Eventually they met, and he asked her to see a show firefighter named Tony Jr., on Lochdale Avenue. with him. Street. But he likes the way Burnaby turned They went to a vaudeville show at the Neratini can remember when out, he says. Pantages Theatre on Hastings Street that Boundary Road was a trail, and when the “It is 100 per cent different. It is buildweekend. water tower was built on Capitol Hill, ing up so fast,” Neratini says. “I think it is “My wife was a real nice-looking girl,” which didn’t have any houses at the time. a great city.” Neratini says. He remembers when Sperling Avenue Do you know of someone who has an She died seven years ago, but he keeps was farmland, and when the first fire interesting life story to share? If so, e-mail their home just as she did, doing all his engine arrived, housed at a water pump Janaya Fuller-Evans at jfuller-evans@ own house cleaning. burnabynow.com. station at Eton Street and Carleton Neratini lives next door to his son, a