Cloverdale has always been the kind of place where you know your neighbours and people take time to chat.
It makes for a close-knit business community, as one member of a group of retired business people can attest.
Oscar Posehn doesn’t live in Cloverdale anymore, but he still comes here on a regular basis to grab lunch with the same group of guys.
They weren’t all acquainted as kids – or as businessmen for that matter – but they share common memories about what it was like growing up here, and love to swap stories.
Since 2001, they’ve been meeting regularly for lunch. A favourite local lunch spot is the Cloverdale Legion, where they grab a glass of beer and a bite, but most of all, they talk.
The group (pictured) includes Bill McLennan, 89, Bob O’Brien, 86, Richard Hornby, 86, Roland Trottier, 81, John Lescisin, 81, Ivan White, 81, and Posehn, 84. Also pictured is the late Allan Dann, who passed away in December, not long after the photograph was taken. Two others recently passed away. Also missing from the group that day were Alan Davidson, 96, and Rocco Zappone.
These get-togethers began 15 years ago, when Posehn found out that Ivan White, a Lord Tweedsmuir pal who’d moved east after graduation, had moved back to South Surrey.
He decided to get a bunch of the guys together for a reunion.
“They were just fellas that I knew,” says Posehn. “It got going from there.”
They meet up every six weeks to two months, usually at the Cloverdale Legion, where they enjoy a glass of beer, talk, and order lunch.
“We all put in $10. That covers the beer and lunch,” he says. “I enjoy it. Everybody seems to enjoy it.”
Whether it’s recalling the pranks and stunts they pulled growing up or discussing recent vacations, the gentlemen never seem to run out of conversation.
“We just talk about old times and what’s going on now,” he says. “There seems to be so many things to talk about.”
Posehn’s Cloverdale roots go way back. He and his family moved here in 1944 from Kronau, Sask.
Theirs was the first house out of town on the east side of Cloverdale, heading north.
“In my time, I knew everybody in Cloverdale,” he says. “I was 12 years old when I moved in. You get to know everybody in a little town.”
As kids, they played at the old baseball diamond – later the location of the Cloverdale Mall – and rode their bikes everywhere, even up and down the ramps for the seating as the Clova Cinema was being built. It opened in 1947.
“Before that we had to go to Langley to see a movie, and that was a long ride on a bike.”
The world was a different place then, and Cloverdale was the heart of Surrey’s agricultural belt, surrounded by productive farmland and wilder areas that beckoned exploration.
Nobody locked their doors.
“I think the older folks looked after us, too. They were all good people.”
Local farmers allowed Posehn and his pals to post their land for hunting each fall so they could shoot ducks and pheasants.
“Then at Christmastime, we’d put a party on for all the farms. We’d get them a bottle of wine and a turkey. It was great thing.”
His strongest memories seem to involve his teen years – a time of high-spirited pranks and adventures.
When they turned 16, Posehn and his friends each had their own cars. His was a 1938 Dodge he paid for with money he’d earned in the summer and from family allowance his mom had saved up.
“We were really good kids, but, like, I remember driving, throwing bottles out of the window into the ditch – those sorts of things.”
They explored the region on their wheels, zipping to Ladner and White Rock in one memorable outing that ended up with a string of traffic violations.
In those days, Posehn’s friends used to hang out in an old train station on the south side of Cloverdale that functioned as a sort of clubhouse.
“Somehow we got permission to use it. We sanded it. We fixed the floors.”
There, they were free from parental constraints, but not the watchful eye of Surrey’s municipal police force, which was in place until 1951, although their methods seem permissive by today’s standards.
“The police used to come in Friday and Saturday night and have a beer with us, and away they went,” Posehn recalls, noting he and his friends were underage, and the police knew it, although their lenience only went so far.
When they announced plans for a road trip to Penticton, they got as far as Langley, where the Provincial Police took their beer away – Surrey’s finest had phoned ahead with a warning to their counterparts that the Cloverdale boys weren’t in any condition to drive.
The clubhouse got closed down. Before long, adult responsibilities replaced youthful fancy.
One after another, the boys got jobs and then married and started families, including Posehn, who married and built a house in Cloverdale.
Posehn ended up working for Woodwards, a department store chain, eventually overseeing construction and renovations.
He retired early, at 62, and now lives in White Rock, which is where he first heard about his former pal returning to the West Coast, and he decided to get the Cloverdale gang back together in November 2001 after so many years.
Most of the guys at that first meeting had grown up together in Cloverdale.
“We started losing people so we started asking Allan Dann and Allan Davidson” to the gatherings, he says.
“It started out, in my mind, just the guys who grew up together and harassed people – nicely though! – we weren’t a bad group.”
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