There is almost nothing left of the Burnaby neighbourhood Pat (Diack) Willis remembers around her old elementary school in the 1930s and 1940s.
Most of her old street (Clydesdale Street) was wiped out by the freeway in ’58; townhouses have supplanted the woods where she once played; and a creek where she used to fish for minnows is now a culvert.
“There’s nothing familiar at all,” she said.
There’s just one exception – Schou Street School.
Willis, 85, revisited the old place last Wednesday, along with more than 100 other alumni, to celebrate the school’s 100th anniversary and its reopening as a continuing education centre.
“It’s exactly the same,” Willis said of the building’s original front gabled entrance, recessed doorway and steps. “It was a wonderful school.”
Many alumni, carrying old class photos, could be heard reminiscing Wednesday about the time they spent on those front steps many years ago, watching the road.
Bill Diack, Willis’s 96-year-old brother, said he used to watch the old cars go by.
Willis herself watched from those steps as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the current monarch’s mother) drove by during a royal visit in 1939.
Willis remembers her teacher, Miss Dorothy Montserrat, a devoted royalist, remarking on the couple’s bearing.
“She said, ‘Take note how the queen sits up so straight and how regal they are.’”
The Diacks, a family with 13 kids, arrived in Burnaby from Winnipeg in a homemade bus in 1930.
Nine of the children attended Schou Street School.
Four – Bill, Betty (Diack) Gould, Bud and Willis – were on hand Wednesday to mingle with old classmates and remember the good-bad old days – the Great Depression, the war – things that galvanized the community, according to Willis.
“I don’t think there’s that feeling among the families anymore because it was a neigbourhood and the families all knew each other,” she said.
The kindergarten to Grade 8 school that served that neighbourhood was repurposed in 1980 and – under the “Schou Education Centre” moniker – acted as the district’s staff development centre until last May.
After six months and $200,000 worth of renovations, it returned to its classroom roots this fall.
It now houses high school completion classes, English language classes and the district’s IT offices.
